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.""

Comments

Re:Huh?

[caitsith01]

"descrimination is bad in any way, shape or form."

As some US President said (Truman?), this is like freeing the slaves from their leg irons and then expecting them to have a fair chance of winning a 100 metre sprint.

'Discrimination' may well have value in righting wrongs.

Alternatively, we could consider the statistics. A vastly disproportionate number of whites get into top universities compared to other races. Either you contend:
- (a) there is some natural genetic reason whites do better (i.e. eugenics ownz)
- (b) there is some sort of bias at the universities
- (c) there is some socio-economic reason other races struggle to get to university and to do as well as whites on their SATs or equivalent

I would hope (a) is unacceptable to you. I think you will find (b) and (c) are more likely explanations - so what do we do about it? Leave things be?

That's a great idea...

[josh crawley]

But what are they going to do about the fact that open source software SUCKS!!

Negative moderation incoming in 5...4...3...2...

Re:Not quite ready

[Petsection]

And right here with your own arguement you managed to expose one of the biggest problems with open source software to date. Mirosoft is packed FULL of features. Hardly anyone uses all of them but once you have a need you'll often discover that their product (bloated though it is) can already do it. In your example with open source, discover a need and then request IBM build it?!? Are you insane? What company can work on that business model??
I like some of the grass roots movement behind open source but realstically, where's the innovation? What can any one of the open source products offer the average user that MS can not?

What has the open source community got that rivals .NET? Have you tried developing in visual studio .net yet? It's light years beyond anything open source.

My intent wasn't to bash open source. I love that Linux is becoming mainstream enough to make microsoft stand up and take notice. But this arguement about going through your supplier for functionality that should have been there anyway is just plain dumb.

Democracy in action

[t0ny]

Wow, just what the IT people need- the ignorant masses telling them what software they have to use. Lets not let the IT staff decide that, let's have the OSS wonks and manipulated politicians decide what the IT staff should be working with.