Slashdot Mirror
LWCE Wrapup
Okay, let's close out the Linuxworld Expo news as best we can. CNet has an article on the march on City Hall (there's also an AP article) to promote open source in government (some people even want to get Linux certified). CNN loves Linux. Bruce Perens, as we mentioned last night, is bailing out of Hewlett-Packard. And Newsforge has several stories from the Linuxworld floor: 1, 2, 3, 4. And finally, CmdrTaco and Chris Dibona (Gamara here on Slashdot) were on TechTV yesterday (and repeats today). Viewer discretion advised.
I know and you know that it would be completly impossible for government to go open source only, atleast for now. We need to do this is baby steps. What we should be preaching is open formats, then we can work on open source. Government has a responcibility that its public records can be read by anyone. And that its private records can be read at a later date. Push open formats, thats what government really needs. Nothing illogical about its requirement, and it will open to door to competition and open source in government IT purchases.
Quote:
But open-source guru Bruce Perens, who marched alongside Tiemann, lamented that most technologists simply aren't paying attention. "It's obvious only a tiny bit of people from (LinuxWorld) turned out, and that presents a problem," he said. "Either they don't understand the issues or they have a business partnership that doesn't allow them to talk about it."
I live in San Francisco and knew nothing of this march. My friends attending LWCE didn't know about this march. "Expected turn out of 20 to a 100" is bollocks. They didn't announce this in advance, or they'd had more participation. I could have gathered at leat 10 people to go with me. Yesterday I was working on a project *downtown*, so a stroll to city hall was very doable *if* we knew about it.
Sheesh...
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Quote from the article on the two dozen saddoes saunter...
At one point, marchers came across a historical plaque that was sponsored by Microsoft. They groaned and quickly papered over the software giant's name with a bumper sticker
Ah, Vandalism. Marvellous way to bring people around to your way of thinking...
"Information wants to be paid"
Ten to twenty people, many of whom aren't from San Francisco, "march" on the San Francisco City Hall for a state issue. Nobody from City Hall meets them there. That is so clueless.
It would be a lot more effective to find some application San Francisco is running, badly, on closed source, and help them out. (Hint: the City Assessor's office is a mess.) SF tax revenues are way down since the dot-com thing tanked, and some help might be welcome. Once you get one or two successes, hold a press conference.
Just publicly donating a copy of Red Hat (since Red Hat's CTO was behind this) to the city, with the explaination that "you can make all the copies you want", made with suitable press coverage, would be more effective.
It's understandable to be too productive to be someone else's employee because you're not being most efficiently utilized, but being too political to be someone else's employee is a different story. Maybe you should look at the Santa Clara unemployment rate and figure out if political inclination is as underutilized as it feels, before resigning from HP.
What part of under Federal investigation for criminal activity do you not grok?
I *never* said that the Gov't should only use opensource or GPLd' software. I'm saying that it's absurd for a Gov't to purchase products from a company that is breaking their laws.
/*drunk.. fix later*/