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German Gov't, Free Software, and Secure E-mail
friday2k writes "There is a nice Article on Newsforge describing how the German Government moves ahead on looking into Free Software solutions for government agencies. And you need a standard, secure, email client for this." Basically, they are funding some good secure e-mail - but making sure that it works with stuff like Kmail.
As many of you had noticed. I'm more of an Anti Open-Source guy. However, I'm glad to see open source used in the government. I'm perfectly okay with Open source as long as it's used by the government, research institutions, education and non profit organisations. For any other type of organisation I would go with EULA type licenses. I don't think that huge, for-profit companies deserve anything for free. For me, it's all about justice, they take our money, we take theirs. Don't be victims, fight back.
Well, sure. I'm a commercial programmer, and I after a string of "bend over and take it" contract modifications, I now give my employer code that meets their standards and no more, i.e. it doesn't crash 90% of the time.
If we ever released our source, our competitors would find and publish all of the bugs in it, while ripping it off (sorry, "clean room re-implementing it"), probably wrecking my company and putting me out of a job.
Wait.. what's the downside again?
My personal experience has been that it's folly to mix work and pleasure. Don't do your hobby as a job, because you'll get screwed into working 80 hours weeks, and you'll end up hating it. So just get screwed 40 hours a week, and reserve your spare time for doing what you enjoy (e.g. open source projects), to your own standards.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Only if you're a dickhead.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.