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Requiring the work done to be made OSS is unfair to the companies which do not want to do that. (But now allowing small companies to bid on the tender isn't an issue)

The government is allowed to set requirements on what they want to receive, and how they want it be be delivered. So technically speaking they can request a can of developers for 10.000 hours, and want to have a fair price in a tender for that. Or you can ask for a software license to allow you to do this and that. Hence if a solution company does not want to deliver such, they will not participate in the tender, but they have been allowed to participate and with a lot of experience might have been able to do so under a reduced cost (much experience in the field, able to reuse previous work). Less money spend is good for the tax payer. But this would still only be able to be used inside the government. Because there is a limitation a public body could act as a private body by the legislation of competition. Imagine the government buying all ground, developing real estate, there couldn't be any competition. The article is about should government require open source software to be independent of suppliers. There are quite a lot of examples where government software development is not about the next "Office" software but in CAD, geospatial, photogrammetry, simulation, urban planning where this software might benefit others. If the government would build a new OS-kernel we would likely all agree this is stupid, what about a competitor to ArcGIS/QGis?

Recently a Gartner report on open source in The Netherlands made an interesting case why with the current legislation the Dutch (and likely European) governments could not contribute to open source software. Governments may use it, but a software developer disguised as civil servant must never be provide patches or features back to the open source project, nor is the government allowed to publish their work in public, publication should be strictly limited to other governments. This would be prohibited due to unfair competition with software suppliers that build closed source software not having the advantage of government support. Now the case of no-vender-lockin still remains, but unless we first change these kind of laws, harnessing the true power of open source: collaboration, is legally not possible.

Yes. Exactly. TFA is off point with it's language. Mobile phones aren't banned in cars in this way either. They are specifically targetting people *holding* mobile phones.

NL Times (The source for NPR) unfortunately aren't all that good with language with frequent spelling and grammatical issues in their articles. From the source, type this baby through google translate: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/b...

"Artikel 61a van het Reglement Verkeersregels en Verkeerstekens 1990 (hierna: RVV 1990) wordt zodanig gewijzigd dat het voortaan voor iedereen die een oertuig bestuurt, dus ook voor fietsers, trambestuurders en bestuurders van alle gehandicaptenvoertuigen, verboden is om tijdens het rijden een mobiel elektronisch apparaat, zoals een mobiele telefoon vast te houden."

That bold part is key. You're not allowed to "hold on" to the electronic device.

Actual text of the proposal is at https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/b...
ARTIKEL I
Het Reglement verkeersregels en verkeerstekens 1990 wordt als volgt gewijzigd:
Artikel 61a komt te luiden:
Het is degene die een voertuig bestuurt verboden tijdens het rijden een mobiel
elektronisch apparaat dat gebruikt kan worden voor communicatie of
informatieverwerking vast te houden. Onder een mobiel elektronisch apparaat wordt in
elk geval verstaan een mobiele telefoon, een tabletcomputer of een mediaspeler.
ARTIKEL II
Dit besluit treedt in werking met ingang van 1 juli 2019.
Lasten en bevelen dat dit besluit met de daarbij behorende nota van toelichting in het
Staatsblad zal worden geplaatst.

I.e.: they ban the handholding of an electronic device that can be used for communication or data processing. They mean as such at least a mobile phone, a tablet computer or a media player.
But what about a boombox? Electronic in nature, can receive radio. And does not have to be powered on.
Could be illegal due to this proposed law...

The Dutch government has concrete plans for a test-and-validation track, near Amsterdam: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/a...

There is more information on this local source:
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/a....

- There will be an "Innovations deal". They will attempt to scrub current rules for "innovation impeding" laws.
- Evaluation of the last EU research program, claims that on average every Euro invested in Research created 11 Euro of wealth.
- The new EU research project (Horizons 2020) is the biggest ever with 70 billion euro.

I have in fact driven in the netherlands. You may think it's not that laid back - you have plainly not driven in the U.S. or anywhere with aggressive traffic for that matter.

I have driven in several states in the US and haven't noticed traffic being more "aggressive" than in the Netherlands. But that's of course anecdotal.

Not that I saw, apart from some speed cameras. It's that more people follow the rules as they are.

You're wrong. There were 9.6 million traffic citations in the Netherlands last year, on 10 million people with a driver's license. That appears to be a lot more (per capita) than in the US. The book "Traffic" by Tom Vanderbilt suggests that the much higher enforcement level may be the reason that the number of traffic fatalities is much less in the Netherlands than in Belgium (3.9 vs 8.1 per 100,000 according to the map).

First, here is the actual PDF instead of some web-based PDF viewer surrounded by dubious ads.

The most damning statement from the report (in my opinion) didn't make the summary: "The separation of critical components was not functioning or was not in place. We have strong indications that the CA-servers, although physically very securely placed in a tempest proof environment, were accessible over the network from the management LAN."

I have worked at company that generated encryption keys and they did so on a PC in a locked rack in a locked room with no network connection; such an approach would have prevented this attack.

This fragment from the timeline is also interesting:

19-Jun-2011 Incident detected by DigiNotar by daily audit procedure
02-Jul-2011 First attempt creating a rogue certificate
10-Jul-2011 The first succeeded rogue certificate (*.Google.com)

So an incident was detected three weeks before the first rogue cert was issued.

There are lots of video's on the websites of the national government. This is just one example, but there's a lot more. There's a whole team dedicated within the Ministry of General Affairs to the production of video's.

Misbruik 112 is strafbaar

Het bellen van 112 als het niet om een noodgeval gaat, is strafbaar. Er kunnen dan slachtoffers vallen omdat personen met een echte noodmelding geen verbinding kunnen krijgen met de alarmcentrale. De politie doet er in het geval van een nepbeller alles aan om zijn identiteit op te sporen en hem aansprakelijk te stellen voor de gemaakte kosten. Daarnaast kan hij een boete of zelfs een gevangenisstraf krijgen. Ook wanneer er anoniem wordt gebeld, is het nummer te zien. Belt iemand met een mobiele telefoon, dan is het nummer ook te achterhalen. Dit kan zelfs als er geen simkaart in de mobiele telefoon zit.

Roughly translated, this says abuse of the emergency number is an offense and the police will do anything in its power to track the abuser. When caught, the abuser is liable for the expenses made by his fake emergency call. On top of that, fines and imprisonment are possibilities. Calling the emergency line is never anonymous, even when caller ID is disabled or no SIM is installed.