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"Software Choice" Campaigns Against Open Source
Verizon Guy writes: "News.com is reporting that a group called The Initiative for Software Choice, led by the CompTIA, but backed primarily by Microsoft and Intel, is lobbying against Open Source-only laws in for example, the State of California government and the government of Peru. While their goals don't specifically mention open source, they do mention that publicly-funded research should steer clear of licenses such as the GPL. Interesting read."
Open source only laws are the embodiment of fiscal
responsibility. You oppose fiscal responsibility,
and favor instead featherbedding and corruption?
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Instead of lobbying for MS-only or GPL-only laws, how about lobbying for the politicians to stop wasting our fucking dollars and use what WORKS.
I personally read that as an assumption that government-funded research should not be encumbered by a license which prevented their use in a closed source proprietary system, which is closer to what the text says. This to me says the code should be on a BSD license. Make it free, but let anyone steal all or part of it. (Which I'm ok with, actually. It doesn't hurt anyone for publicly written code to be used in that way, provided it is still available to the rest of us on the same license.)
I agree with Ioldanach above, but I also wanted to address one point you made.
personally, i don't appreciate giving money to the government, in the form of taxes, and then having to buy back from them what they discovered thanks to my money
Microsoft also pays taxes. A lot of taxes.
I believe a 2-clause BSD license or just releasing it in the public domain would suit everyone.
Equally laws to coerce states into using one type of software are ridiculous and ideological. Ideology is almost always going to be wrong regardless of what it is. The cost of software is not a significant cost when hiring employees. If I chose to work for a government agency I want to be allowed to use high quality professional software not pieces of utter amateur crap that are 'almost as good, yes really'. Clearly they are not, several of the Sun people I know ended up buying Microsoft Office themselves because they refuse to use the Sun substitute. There is nothing in the open source world that touches Visio, Adobe Premiere or Visual Studio .NET.
The cost of outfitting an entire department with Microsoft everything is trivial compared to the cost of consultants. The big five charge in the region of $2,000 per consultant per day.
notice that they also asked that research not be put under GPL-like licenses, under the assumption that government-funded research should be resold afterwards ...
Like the title you are mistating the issue here. I think that there is a lot of consensus that code developed with public funds should be Free. But GPL does not mean free, it means heavily encumbered by a bushel-load of RMS's ideology
If code is being developed with public funds the default license should be BSD style, free as in beer. RMS did have a point about Symbolics, huge amounts of DARPA cash went to develop the Lisp machine and Genera and was then diverted to a private company for private profit. The attempts by many universities to control the rights to code are simply grasping.
The problem with GPL is that if you take it seriously and actually read it the GPL license stops code even being used for reference purposes since a programmer who reads GPL code is just as tainted as someone who disassembled proprietary code.
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