Software Libre: DoHS Switches, Commerce Slights

An anonymous reader writes "Some excellent Pigdog investigative journalism: Apparently, The state department is trying to block international support of OSS and Free (Libre) Software. See also this InfoWorld article." Contrast that with this NewsForge report of a switch from Windows 2000 to Linux+Oracle at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. They picked a good week for it.

Comments

Re:This isn't a bad thing, people!

[HiThere]

... I hope one day that most OSS goes thru as rigorous quality control that most major closed-source programs do.

I think that your experiences with closed-source programs has been different from mine ... though you did say major. Major OSS programs get good testing too. Mozilla has caused me less troubles than Netscape. It would be unfair to compare it against InternetExplorer, as I have never upgraded that beyond 1.35. And Konqueror is as stable as Mozilla, if not quite as easy to use (for me).
The OSS programs that are unstable tend to be either the beta programs or the minor ones, and let me tell you that the minor commercial programs [on windows] are an excellent way to waste money and trash systems (as well as, occasionally, being the best programs around). On Linux they are merely an excellent way to waste money.

It's nice to wish that everything were perfect, but it's not that way, and you don't really gain much by pretending that it is. Working to make it closer ... now that yields benefits.