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Mega-Geek March?
hammerm writes " According to an article on infoworld.com, 'A group of open source and free software developers is planning to lead a march on San Francisco's City Hall next week in an effort to promote the use of freely available software by California's government offices,' and it goes on to say 'it aims to bring attention to proposed legislation that would require California's government offices to use software with freely available source code rather than products from proprietary vendors such as Microsoft Corp.'"
I don't understand why people are supporting this. Requiring the government to use a specific type of software is a bad idea, whether that software be open source or closed source. The government should be using the best software for the job. All types of software should be considered, and all aspects of the software (availability of source code, price, features, easy of use, etc) should be considered. The minute you lock into one type of software, you set yourself up for major problems. Sure, Linux and Open Office are good enough to replace Windows and MS Office, but if they require all their software be OSS, what are they going to use for their financial system? The OSS financial products are no where near as good as the closed source products. There are some places where there just isn't a good OSS alternative and requiring them to use an inferior product makes no sense at all. We should be encouraging the government to consider all products equally, not trying to pull the same tactics that MS is pulling. It's no more right for the OSS community to lock people in than it is for the CSS people (even less right when we are trying to make it a law that cannot easily be changed if the policy is bad).
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Legislation demanding the use of one type of software, with licensing the primary concern, goes a bit too far. Legislation should instead simply dictate that all types of software are considered - bringing open source packages to the attention of decision makers is sometimes all that's needed, as many only know about MS, Lotus, etc. and don't know about some quality open source packages which perform the same task for a lower cost or with other benefits.
LEGISLATING that everyone has to use open source regardless of other factors has a bad impact. It smacks of 'affirmative action' programs and admission standards - you can't always be sure the people around you are there in that job or student seat because they can actually hack it, or there was a government program that placed them there regardless of merit or ability.
Legislating a written review process for software would help open the process to open source. Consider if we had written records of purchasing decisions. For example, person X considered Open Office, but went ahead and purchased 500 copies of Word for a bank of users who only ever read memos emailed from another branch. Having that on record, open for review, will surely help departments consider open source more, if only initially from a financial standpoint. It won't be an overnight thing, but it'll help.
It's just as wrong to legislate everyone use Open Office as it is to legislate that everyone use MS Office.
creation science book
The real point should be open DATA FORMATS...the government should be able to know the format of all the data that it is storing on behalf of the people of the state. I 100% agree that government procurement is a great way to enforce this kind of thing, but they should be pushing for something else. Open source, closed source, whatever...just make the data formats available.
- adam
here's a better idea.. start a foundation and instead of wasting money on the inevitable stupid looking costumes, each geek contributes $10. Next, select a politician target to defeat, preferably one of the DMCA proponent idiots. Take a pool of collected cash and give it to the opponent of the targetted politician and vote for the opponent come this midterm election. Given this is a midterm election, turn out will be light. After tossing out the targetted politician, put another politician in the crosshair. All we need is that first unemployed politician to make them take notice.
a march just convince the rest of the population that geeks are a bunch of weirdos and must avoid eye contact at every opportunity.
-- I have enough stupid gadgets to know that I can do without -- http://www.modestneeds.org
What annoys me about these open-source fanatics, is that they have to force their beliefs on to other people. And just because they want everything open source, everyone else should hear about it.
This is not about "Linux is cool!", this is about avoiding security through obscurity, and making sure security related code is solid. If this was a march to try to get the government to mandate open source office software or something like that, I would agree with you, but I am all for security related code needing to be open source.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Not to be a troll, but this is my view on this:
I understand from your words: "If you can't fight them, join them."
Read, if they can bribe politicians, why can't we?
How can you be sure that the politician the money goes to doesn't ask for more and give less than expected? How are you even sure there is a politician that is willing to help?
A politician recieves money, and then recieves more money from a different corporation, he acts for the big corporation and all the money spent has been lost.
If there is some politician that will aid in this, fine... If there isn't, the money would be better spent donating to Free/Open Software companies/organizations that really need the money to help and not just a slight chance that the politician will stay on "our" side.
^_^