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Oregon Bill Would Require Open Source Consideration
VeniDormi writes "I just found out that House Bill 2892 was introduced in the Oregon House of Representatives by Representative Phil Barnhart. The summary: 'Requires state government to consider using open source software when acquiring new software. Sets other requirements for acquiring software.'
Rep. Barnhart has a few comments on the bill." A NewsForge story has more information, including some words from Rep. Barnhart.
Requires state government to consider using open source software when acquiring new software. Sets other requirements for acquiring software.
In many cases where highly specialized applications are required, the consideration of opensource alternatives will show that while linux has multiple nice desktops, multiple nice office suites, multiple nice browsers, multiple nice email clients... it still has a number of fronts to work on.
When you compare all enterprise commercial apps against the most mature and most turnkey opensource ones, you'll find a lot of projects with good intentions but little functionality compared to commercial offerings.
The free software world is all about code and component reuse and sharing, and the attitude of 'hope someone can find use for this thing that I wrote - if it doesn't meet your needs or doesn't work, let me know and I might choose to do something about it... better yet, can you help? Here's the sourcecode'
If the government is committed to hiring software developers to *MAKE* opensource software work by *ENHANCING* it and *EXTENDING* it's functionality, then... HORRAY! We all Win.