Slashdot Mirror
Embarrassing Governments Into Adopting Open Source
caitsith01 writes "An effort is currently underway to embarrass the Australian Federal Government into adopting open source software. As this story explains, the Australian Democrats have put questions on notice in Parliament that will require all government ministers to disclose how much money their departments spend on Microsoft products each year. The idea is to force open source issues to the fore by showing just how much money Microsoft receives from the government. It could be a smart approach - the average taxpayer knows little or nothing about OSS, but will rapidly form and express vocal opinions about the government wasting money. The article also mentions that a bill may be introduced to Federal Parliament to mandate the consideration of open source solutions (you may remember this story about an Australian state trying to introduce similar legislation). Some quotes from the article: "What the country doesn't need is to be tied into a profit-maximising licensing system, and the way to combat that is to get government to break out of the paradigm." On the other hand, the (right wing) Liberal Party criticises suggestions that use of open source should be compulsory as "hi-tech affirmative action.""
"How much money does Microsoft spend on each minister. That would be truly embarassing, specially in the US."
Do you see US politicians being embarrased about being bought by Big Corp? I don't. Quite the opposite, actually. The entire cabinet is full of old-boy club members handing out favors to each other. And nobody cares.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
on /. you could better explain it like:
There is microsoft with its windows product line, and there is linux with it various distirbutions.
the democrats are like the thirth party: BSD, small but with their own motto (free!).
By the way its has been proven: BSD is dying 8-).
Because of course, linux is free. If you don't value your time, that is.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.