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Who Opposes Open Source Software In Government?
Skapare writes "Linux Journal is doing a story with a roundup of who the players are that are opposing open source in governments. The one I find interesting is the Gates connection to BSA. But I think we all need to become familiar with this round-up of special interest groups not operating in our interests (as taxpayers)."
Even Windows is "Open Source". If you really want the benefits that we are all talking about here we need to think about how we can encourage the use of Free Software (rather than bastardized Open Source Software).
Take a look at the FSF website for more information regarding the benefits of Free Software.
The problem with all this "Open Source" software advocacy (and the main reason there is no effective advocacy of it in government) is that there are too many interpretations of what it is. You have everything from ESR's idiotic concept of non-Free OSS all the way to Microsoft's pay2play OSS. If everyone would simply get on the same page with the correct FSF interpretation of FREE SOFTWARE, advocacy of FS would be much more effective.
I have been pwned because my
"Consider BSA to be of the highest professional caliber..."
Sorry, you lost me there.
I love the mods here, this post is flamebait because it raises real questions. But the parent of it, which slams the US mercilessly, is insightful.
Someone should start a US-only geek board and just block the addresses of the Europeans already. As if we care what they think, it's all "The US Sucks!" anyway. It's enough to make you want to just stop reading. Hey...that's an idea...
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Hey, you fucking troll... how about clamming up and letting us grownups talk? Reliability, hard to adminster, blah, blah, blah. That's a 10 year old troll whose time has come and gone. Come up with a new troll, THEN come back.
Paragraph 1 I can agree with.
It's why open source is a grass roots movement. We aim to capture hearts and minds on a fundamental and righteous level. We target the wallet second.
I don't see Open Source as grass roots. It has a decidedly elitist flavor to it. RMS attended MIT, and his FSF was bankrolled by the McArthur foundation and charitable donations, many from corporations. Linus Torvalds is a Finish expatriot. ESR and Bruce Perens splintered off from the FSF with aims to make Free Software more palatable for business. Many of the major contributors to FS/OSS work in an academic setting where pride in being "better than the unwashed masses" is a given. This can't be described as "grass roots", at least this is not the US concept of the term as I know it.
Open source saves the government money. Open source would create more governemnt jobs
At this point, my head almost exploded.
Britian, France, Japan, Peru, China and Germany are all moving to Linux and open source. Hell, some are even writing up legislation that gives incentives to businesses that do so as well. Why aren't we (the United States)?
The Left told us that we couldn't build smokestacks. So heavy industry left. The Left told us we couldn't drill for oil. So the rigs left. The Left told us we couldn't build nuke plants. So the nukes left. The Left drove union wages sky high. So the remaining non-polluting industrial jobs left.
Faced with this situation, the ever industrious people of the US turned to IP--"movies, music, and microcode" as it was so eloquently put, are now the primary engine of the economy. So naturally the Left hates that.
If you don't like an IP-based economy, fine. What are you going to replace it with?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?