New York City Examines Law Mandating Open Source

An anonymous submitter writes "The New York Council held a hearing on the 'SOFTWARE WARS.' The Select Committee on Technology in Government, chaired by Council Member Gale A. Brewer (D-Manhattan), held a public hearing Tuesday on software procurement practices by state and local governments. Representatives from the City's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, Microsoft, as well as numerous local software companies testified. Newsforge is carrying the testimony at the hearing of Tony Stanco, Director of The Center of Open Source & Government." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.

Comments

Right tool for the right job

[rf0]

Whatever way you look at this you have to heopt he the NY council will get the right tool for the right job. If you have a system that is old,closed source but works for months on end then why should you change it?

Also if you think about the machines on workers desktops should they all be switch to Linux as its free? I personally would say no as you will soon lose more with a drop in productivity as people have to learn something new.

Just my $0.02

Rus

I'd rather MS get every government contract...

[samdu]

...than see Open Source mandated. No single source of software should be mandated. The government should be free to evaluate each solution based on its merits and price/performance. Mandating anything like this is a bad idea.