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Peruvian Congressman vs. Microsoft FUD
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Carve a new face on the Mount Rushmore of Linux:
Peruvian Congressman David Villanueva Nuñez brilliantly vapourizes the Chicken Little division of the MS Fud Machine.
Long read but inspiring.
Add another name to the list of people who get
that 'All that is required for Evil to triumph
is that good men do nothing.'"
Update: 05/07 00:03 GMT by T : Antonio Ognio Cesti has an update: "We are some activists working
here in Peru to bring the documents
to more eyeballs with better bandwidth." They've done just that, writing, "Now we have much better hosting in the U.S. and the original FUD letter completely translated into English."
Not because OSS is best in *every* situation - but because in the 80% where it is the right decision, this article explains the needs to do it right (ie - have staff that is trained, pay for support), while dismissing the fears sent by proprietary companies.
The fact is, OSS is here to stay in the business, and only by really competing (ie - coming up with a better product for the price) can businesses hope to keep profitable. Of course, with more companies (Red Hat, Suse, IBM) making a profit from Open Source, the consumer will win every time.
Ah, competition. How I love thee.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Yes, this was just posted Saturday, but I'll bet a lot of people don't look back at stuff from the weekends. That being said ...
His letter is a long way of saying, "Please decide which side of your mouth to speak out of." By the third time he pointed out, "This contradicts what you said in the previous paragraph," I had tears streaming down my face.
This contradiction alone would invalidate your position.
...
This argument repeats that already given in paragraph 5 and partly contradicts paragraph 3. For the sake of brevity we refer to the comments on those paragraphs.
...
In addition, in this paragraph you correctly point out that the service components and losses due to down-time make up the largest part of the total cost of software use, which, as you will note, contradicts your statement regarding the small value of services suggested in paragraph 3.
...
On the other hand, there certainly exist types of volume licensing (although unfortunately proprietary software does not satisfy the basic principles). But as you correctly pointed out in the immediately precding paragraph of your letter, they only manage to reduce the impact of a component which makes up no more than 8% of the total.
Nope, no sig
Everyone of the argument planks in the proposed bill is good, and not just for Peru. Every sovereign government based upon the ideas of representative democracy can expect similar gains if they were to follow the same principles. They are logical principles.
Free, unencumbered and open communication are the hallmarks of any society that hopes to better itself. Restricting communication to those who can afford to pay for a read/write access device, such as MS Word or Corel Wordperfect or whatever, is an inefficiency, pure and simple.
Enduring archival of public documents is, likewise, important for any society that wishes to learn from history instead of repeating the same mistakes. A written language used to be enough to guarantee such archival. Now, the essential medium is no longer paper, but the authoring and reading of documents is no longer just a matter of learning how to read and write, it's become of matter of having paid all of the taxes.
National security issues of knowing exactly what it is you are running. This is one issue that largely continues beneath the surface. It's very surprising to me that in the post 9/11 world that more hasn't been made of critical infrastructure running only programs you can see for yourself and compile for yourself.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You know whenever I read Tony Blair's speeches for instance or the writings of other foreign politicians such as this one, I get a little jealous. The holder of the highest political office in this country, in addition to constantly using phrases like "evil-doers" and "smoke 'em out of their holes", says things like:
"This foreign policy stuff is a little frustrating."
- G.W. Bush as quoted by the New York Daily News, April 23, 2002
See http://www.bushcartoon.com/bushisms.html for more examples.
I don't understand why there is so much aggrivated rivalry between Linux, BSD, OSX, etc. Friendly competition, and even friendly jibes, are understandable. But the 'ha ha, it's BSD not linux!' or vice versa, is childish and regressive.
I've been using Linux since 1996, and I love it. But I don't feel any enmity with the BSD folk, or any other free software/OSS system. I use RedHat. Not because it's necessarily better, but it works for me and I like it. But if you like Debian, or Gentoo, or SuSE, more power to you! I don't feel the need to inflict my choice on you.
Competition is good. Gnome vs KDE is good for both sides. It stimulates thought and advancement. Same goes for Linux vs BSD. I mean, come on! Most of the software even runs on both platforms!
MS, on the other hand, isn't about competition. It's about crushing everything that isn't MS. They don't give you a choice. In fact, the take away choices that you already have. That's worth fighting against.
If Peru goes BSD, then great! If they use Linux, fantastic! It doesn't matter, because it means freedom in either case. It also means great interoperability, because Linux & BSD get along just fine in a heterogenous environment. So they could use BSD *and* Linux! That's the whole point.
This article is a follow-up of the story posted on Saturday. Geez people you people are like rabid dogs.
I've read a bit of the Federalist Papers (okay, it was just Alexander Hamilton's brilliant first paper... it goes downhill as soon as you get to John Jay's first writing) and of course we've all read the Declaration of Independence and other such great documents. And this reads like one of those documents. This guy could give lessons in what being a Democratic and Free state really means to the US Government. In fact, I think this letter should be required reading for all US Government officials.
I'd even go as far as to say we should begin a letter-writing campaign to mail copies of this to our congress-critters, to the White House, and to the national news media.
I'm going to put this on my TODO: list. I am going to draft a letter with these contents, and mail them to the people who represent me.
As the submitter said, "All that is required for Evil to triumph is that good men do nothing." I may not be a perfectly good man, but I'm going to do SOMETHING!
With free software one creates more technically qualified employment and a framework of free competence
This statement alone should form the basis for many kinds of IT decisions, not just purchasing. Absolute brilliance.
where success is only tied to the ability to offer good technical support and quality of service, one stimulates the market, and one increases the shared fund of knowledge, opening up alternatives to generate services of greater total value and a higher quality level, to the benefit of all involved: producers, service organizations, and consumers.
Hear, hear. Stating that a smarter, better informed "consumer" is a better served consumer is profound in its simplicity, and it neatly states an irrefutable argument that I think developers and admins have been trying to put into words for decades.