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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)."
It doesn't seem like anyone (who isn't affiliated with a proprietary software company) is necessarily against open source as they are against the idea of the change itself. Changes in government are mostly reactionary. You need a large number of voters interested in the issue, otherwise its hardly worth the time. I believe the opponents to the open-source bills were mostly afraid to favor open-source; they weren't against it.
They testify that releasing the code to their competitors would constitute a clear and present danger to national security then give the source 3 months later to a communist country. Excuse the hell out of me, either MS doesn't care or they are too daft to read the obvious writings on the wall. Anyone who has read anything on how the Chinese view us militarily knows that the PLA's documents call for "alternative means" to take out the US's critical infrastructure and military forces. I'm sorry, but given their history with our legal system, I think they are some of the most disgusting treasonous scum in corporate America.
The only thing worse was IIRC Boeing it was that moved Loral rocket technology to China to launch satellites knowing damn well that much of that technology was dual purpose. Now the PRC has missile technology that is approaching ours. Thank you corporate America, may so many of you be among the first up against the wall.
Your right to try to turn a profit ends where our national security is concerned. I don't give a flying fuck why Microsoft released Windows' source code to them, but that alone is grounds to punish them by shit-canning their products in the federal government. Every desktop should be switched to MacOS X and/or Linux and MS Office replaced with OpenOffice. We have to draw a line in the sand and scream at them YOUR BEHAVIOR IS NOT ACCEPTABLE YOU UNPATRIOTIC FUCKERS!
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
That may be true, but that doesn't mean microsoft hasn't bought a substantial part of the government.
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
a corrupt and entrenched mass of politicians who have no incentive for doing what is good for the electorate because they don't need to do so to remain in power.
:)
I thought that was the definition of government.
Seriously, the people of the US have a heck of alot of more important things to worry about than whether the Government chooses Linux vs. Microsoft. Do you think the CEO of General Electric gives a crap whether the OS of choice on Random Project X is Linux or Microsoft. Heck No!
Anyway, the money that would be saved by going from Microsoft to Linux is miniscule compared to the money spent on pork barrel projects by both sides of the isle. Unforunately, pork barrel projects are essentially politicans bribing their own people so they are hard to remove.
Brian Ellenberger
It needs to be based on free, open and documented standards.
And for the record, there have been plenty of security holes in Linux and the many packages for it. The difference is they are usually fixed faster. Think sendmail or bind here. How many stupid bugs are in those?
We can praise the nations that throw caution to the wind and roll out Linux rapidly.
Funny thing: For the past year, I've been working for a little consulting company whose main contract is a big European conglomerate that's doing just that. Their management was getting more and more paranoid about the implications that their corporate data was under the control of a big American corporation. We're extracting all their data (with precious little help from that big American corporation, who know that they've lost the contract) and putting it into a flock of networked linux systems. And to do the the job, they hired an American company! But it makes sense, because our chief's main sales pitch has been to point out that we're building a system that they will control from the top to the bottom.
Linux is NOT a perfect beast, and it should surprise no rational person that it is, at this time, treated as "the devil you don't know".
One of the stories was of a big meeting at the big conglomerate's site. One of their managers brought up the subject of linux support. Our guy asked for a show of hands: How many ran linux at home. About 1/3 of the hands went up. He observed that they didn't need to hire any more linux expertise.
Linux is hardly an unknown. Anyone who says they'll have trouble finding linux expertise is simply shovelling a pile of BS. For that matter, finding BSD expertise is nearly as easy, especially now that OSX is getting rave reviews.
It makes sense to transition gradually. But it need not take many years. Especially when the inevitable happens and MS forces you to upgrade. Transitioning to linux then will be cheaper, and it won't take much more retraining. So you might as well do it, and get out from under the thumb of the American beast.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
What's worse is how the FTC (under Clinton) approved the sale of several supercomputers (Crays I believe) that were on the export control list to China.
It gets tiring hearing this stuff.
Clinton's admin did not overtly or covertly approve of missile technlogy transfer (most of which was completed between 1990-1994; basically starting during Bushes era). These companies were tried and found guilty . To be honest, I suspect that this stuff is back happening again.
As to the low-end cray's, they did not even make top500.org. The question that should always be asked is, does a transer give an advantage to an enemy (or future advisory) that they will not be able to get elsewhere. If they can not get it elsewhere, then we should not sell it. If they can, then we should sell it and try to modify it so that we can use it in trying times. It is hard to embed keys or backdoors in a single (or couple of) chips or an OS (witness the NSA key in MS Windows). But in a large system that is outdated and easily beaten by Beowulf systems. To be honest, china was almost certainly not using these for computations, but most likely needed something from them (logic boards to copy,etc). By missdoing it slightly, we can then detect what they are up to.
I have no love for Clinton (but a much larger disdain for the current admin's theft of our rights), it is better to knock him for what was done wrong rather than come off sounding like Bill Gates or Rush Limbaugh.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In the sense that it saves the tax payer incredible amounts of software license purchases for large scale systems.
Of course I'm only referring to the GPL licensed open source. It would be pointless if someone open sourced something and refuse to deliever the source unless you pay em a billion dollars.
But back to main point why governments should be using open source.
1. We all know that the government systems are probably just a step up more secure then university systems. Colleges have been strong supporters of *nix / open source but never truly as secure as businesses, so why bother? Well because colleges like government are big entities that are kinda very inefficient because the markets don't punish (I'm definitely dumbing down the issue... you bond/rating agency guys must forgive me) governments or colleges for inefficiencies. The cost of these inefficiencies acutally do produce savings because government employees are not paid a lot and it wouldn't be worth it to pay so much more to buy 10000 licenses when you can just buy 1 and distribute.
2. Another reason why the government should be open source is because it's tied very closely to academia. Most of the huge research labs/super computing facilities are sponsored by the government. I'd shudder to think how little work would be done with a closed source solution when the scientists are acutally intelligent enough to know how to hack the code.
3. The fact that all top secret military stuff like nukes and all that dangerous shit is definitely not open source and probably some ass backwards properitary system that you'd have to learn san script to break in.. just makes me all the more comfortable knowing the government doesn't use open source on shit like that.. which comes back to the Terry Pratchett quote... "If there was a big red button and you put a big sign next to it that said 'Don't push' some idiot is bound to push it" kind of mentality that retarded people in this world have when it comes to dealing with classified information.
So if you've read down this far congratz on listening to an old man rant.. but it wouldn't be complete with out a point.. which is PEOPLE... there are places for open source.. and there are places for closed source... the government doens't just look at MS or linux...
unlike some certain group of readers of a certain website... So instead of being hard core open source or hard core closed source..
Sit back... think about what each is good for... and choose appropriately.