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German Free/Open Source Migration Project
Jaws writes: "BSI (the German equivalent of NIST) has announced a project proposal for planning and implementation of partial migration of certain federal government offices to free/open source products. Three sites in two cities, servers and desktops, each site with a few dozen/several hundred seats. They are asking for a full-service, detailed plan including infrastructure, installation, documentation, support, and education. Looks like a reasonable pilot project. (The original in German; Fish-English version)"
The fish is alive and well, it only complains about the "bad referrer" but if u go to the front page and manually input the site's URL and translate German to English, it works like a breeze.
:-) )
I guess they just blacklisted Slashdot fearing the Intermediate Slashdot Effect (Since many people dont speak German, they all go to babelfish and IT gets killed, instead of the actual destination
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
the police in a german state - niedersachsen (lower saxonia) will even completely move to linux. about 11000 desktop linux computers will be used from 2004 on. these clients will connect to a high speed linux cluster. the special police software is written in java, star office 6 and netscape communicator will be used.
0 4.02-0 00/
the lower saxonia police tested win2k and xp against linux and found out that linux is more secure, easier to administrate and saves about 20 milliones euros in 10 years.
at the present time lower saxonia police uses 5500 x terminals with 200 unix mainframes.
the text in german is here
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/odi-17.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
> the hard line taken by GNU [gnu.org], the FSF [fsf.org], and people like RMS and ESR, has
> reminded more than one person of the fascism practiced half a century ago in Germany
Even as a jokster you should learn the difference between fascism and communism. Faschism is in no ideological way concerned with the redestribution of wealth; that is the prerogative of communism. Faschism is what Mr. Ashcroft and his Bible buddies practice.
BSI = "Bundesamt fuer Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik" -> "Federal Department for Security in Information Technology". Their mission is comparable to NSA's Information Assurance Directorate. Their site is far more informative than NSA's site, chock full of security advice though as always in all things security I advise to take whatever anybody says with a grain of salt. They've also got that other mission just like NSA does.
They've opensourced Sphinx, formerly a project aimed at providing secure email within German government agencies which is essentially a plugin for various email clients (appa which implements S/MIME as well as an S/MIME incompatible national encrypted email standard called MailTrust (spec available in German only). Apparently they're integrating the Sphinx code in KDE's kMail and in mutt. You can find the Sphinx code here.
Another opensource project I could find right away is DiCop (Distributed Computing in Perl), a GPL'd distributed job execution environment consisting of an administration server and client/worker software. The administration server sends jobs to the client/workers and collects the results. You can get DiCop here.
Please keep in mind that BSI is an agency of a foreign government no longer outright sympathetic to American interests.
> IIRC Fascism is state control of private property
Wrong, that's communism. Faschism is concerned with nationalism and xenophobia, the belief in the superiority of certain races over others, etc. It's focused on social order issues rather than economic ones. For example, Germany under Nazi rule was mostly a market economy, with the exception that party officials had lots of latitude in intervening in individual companies. After all, if you wield absolute power, laws of commerce don't mean all that much. You can always "expose" the proprietors as Jews if they don't give you your piece of the pie.
> Communism/socialism are state ownership of all property.
That's exactly what I said, but you claimed that about fascism.
A major difference between communism and fascism is that while the former had a well formalized doctrine (e.g. Marx's writings), the latter didn't. While we can judge communist ideology by reading its writings AND by observing its implementations, fascism is really only defined by its implementations. There is no The Fascist Manifest to draw upon (unless you consider Mein Kampf and Goebbels' ramblings that), only the fascist reality under Nazi rule. Given that, you have to conclude that the heart of fascist ideology is social darwinism (aided by personal biases), rather than any economic considerations. Control of the economy was more of a consequence of opportunity rather than doctrine. Of course, since expansion was central to Nazi doctrine (Lebensraum), and this required military build-up and war, which in turn required huge sums of money and industrial production, you could argue that control and redirection of the economy towards these goals was vital to Nazi doctrine as well. But I would still consider it more a consequence than a goal. Nazis weren't at all concerned with redestribution of wealth and the creation of an egalitarian society. In fact, they were quite happy with the concentration of wealth in the hands of a devoted few.