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The Economist on Open Source in Government
locarecords.com writes "The Economist has an excellent article about Microsoft attempting to undermine the Open Source and Free Software movements. Particularly interesting are the issues relating to proprietary software and government and how other countries are mandating free software in government software projects."
Looks like the Department of Defense has actuallygiven the nodto open source - or at least recognized its existence.
That's all good for us as end-users and customers, but an open documents format would be suicide for company like Microsoft.
I'm glad that Opera, Mozilla...etc,etc,etc and Apache server kept Microsoft from controlling the HTML standards completely!!
More than enough BS
It uses every font installed on my computer - whether I boot Linux or Windows. It does them in every size and the printed output looks the same as any other word processor.
.DOC .XLS or whatever format when bringing files to work, or emailing them to people.
Yes, there are deficiencies. It doesn't have a database or email/calendar programme. I'm not sure what I would use for the former but I know they are debating it in their mailing lists. For email/calendar there is Mozilla. That's not perfect either, but it's the only browser I use.
I recently gave a copy to a nurse at work who wanted MS office but was not going to pay that sort of price. I installed OOO on her laptop and she took it home. The only verbal assistance I gave was a reminder to save things to
I asked how it was going after a couple of weeks. The reply was "it just works".
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
The Brazilian government plans to migrate from
Windows to Linux 80% of all computers in state institutions and state-owned
businesses, informed the daily newspaper "Valor". This will be a gradual
migration, that will begin with a pilot project in one ministry and which will
be completed over a period of three years, according to official sources cited
by the financial daily.
The goal of the migration is to save money by finding alternatives to
expensive proprietary licenses. Highlighting the gradual phase-in approach
that the Brazilian government has adopted, Sergio Amadeu de Silveira, the
president of the National Institute of Information Technology, stated that "We
are not just going to do a hasty migration". He proceeded to say that "our
main concern is the security and the trust of our citizens. The biggest
resistance to any change comes from the existing cultural inertia".
The government, De Silveira explained, created two weeks ago the "Chamber for
the Implementation of Software Libre" to pave the way for the upcoming
migration.
A small part of the 2,095 million reals (about USD $700 million) that the
Brazilian government budgeted for information technology spending goes to
Microsoft, owner of the Windows OS. The government's decision to adopt Linux,
according to De Silveira, will boost the popularity of the operating system
among businesses and consumers. Moreover, it will foster the production of
local software and "democratize access to knowledge", said De Silveira.
Lots of people rag on "captialism" without realizing that what they are complaining about is the shortfallings of our own systems from being capitalistic. Government intervention is necessary to remove corruptions like monopolization from the system. And "we, the people" are needed to remove corruption from the government.