German Governmental Agency Says: Use Open Source

belbo writes "An official team of the German Ministry of the Interior has released a statement which examines the possible use of Open Source software in the German administration. The statement concludes: "Linux and FreeBSD and accompanying Free or commercial software provide a stable, cheap, low-on-resources, safe and sufficiently supported environment even for professional offices." Does this mean I can write my next tax declaration in Vi? ;-) "

Comments

Scientology, Microsoft, and Germany

[Frater 219]

Please see this article in c't about Scientology's relation to DisKeeper. Please note that the headline refers only to Windows 2000 being "banned" from government use, not from private use.

Executive Software is not only run by a Scientologist; it is a member of WISE, the World Institute of Scientology Enterprises. WISE member corporations are operated for the benefit of the Church of Scientology, even though the CoS is supposedly a "nonprofit religious organization" and the WISE orgs are for-profit corporations.

No, it means that they say it's ok for them

[WillAffleck]

Babelfish said that it means that the German Federal offices can use Open Source products. Not you, just the office workers. Which jibes with my rusty German understanding of the document.

So, if you work for the German Federal government, you can go ahead and use Open Source software now.

good government

[eries]

Using open-source products is good government. In fact, I think it helps to mollify one of the real problems of most modern states.

usually, when the government spends money on a project, only one group in the population benefits. Although this is often a large group, there are almost always some people who are left out.

But with OSS, when the government works on a special program designed for one group, the whole community benefits, because the whole community gets free source. And more, since in the course of the project it's highly likely that the government-employed programmers will contribute patches, code, ideas, etc. to other projects.

So, not only is OSS good for government, it also constitutes good government.

Want to work at Transmeta? Hedgefund.net? AT&T?

I'd like to see the US govt do the same

[Software Cowboy]

When I was a govt contractor, we were using the GNU tools and perl on several Department of Defense projects because the were the most portable around. Of course these were Unix based projects.

Is anyone out there actively lobbying the government to officially endorse OSS solutions rather than proprietary software? It seems to me as a taxpayer that I would like to see the vast number of government projects out there actively evaluate Linux as well as Solaris and NT as platforms.

Not only would they be getting a high quality, low cost platform, the code that the government contractors develop could be fed back into the community. The govt develops a considerable amount of software and while much of it is specific to its needs, there are other areas such as infrastructure where having an OSS solution makes sense.

If they used OSS software as the basis of building their systems, it would prevent a lot of the reinventing of the wheel and proprietary lock-in that occurs now.

Just when MS is having problems in Germany

[ContinuousPark]

In a somewhat off-topic note, Wired News ran a story yesterday about MS's problems introducing Win2K in Germany. It seems that Win2K comes bundled with an defragmentation utility called DisKeeper; now, this utility was written by a company called Executive Software and the German government has a problem with this because Executive's CEO is a member of the Church of Scientology. Under German Law, state and federal governments can't do business with a member of the Church of Scientology (maybe someone knows exactly why, I don't). So there were rumors over the weekend that MS was disclosing (parts of) the Win2K code for the German Govt to examine. Just thought this might be interesting.

Re:Just when MS is having problems in Germany

[Hanno]

> Under German Law, state and federal
> governments can't do business with a
> member of the Church of Scientology
> (maybe someone knows exactly why, I
> don't).

For more info about Scientology (plus a lot of English translations of the German governments' view on this self-declared "church"): http://www.xenu.net/

Quote: L. Ron Hubbard (founder of Scientology): "Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion"

To sum it up: Scientology claims to be a church, but Germany (among others) does not grant this organization this status and generally calls Scientology's beliefs and practices unconstitutional.

The German government sees Scientology as an oppressive psycho-cult that uses its "church" status to hide behind laws that protect religions and grant tax reductions.

Scientology, firm in its belief that it is destined to "clear" the world to make it a Scientology-only place, has repeatedly engouraged its members to use dirty and illegal tricks against non-members for the (financial) benefit of the cult.

Now you may understand why having a core application of an operating system used by most businesses and governments world wide under the control of an unethical, mad cult creates a bit of an eery feeling for some folks.

Sure, Microsoft is jokingly called the evil empire, but nevertheless, Scientology *is* an evil empire.



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