Slashdot Mirror
Get Listed Free In Gov't Open Source Directory
BanJoota writes "Probably most useful for U.S. people, but sounds like a good deal. The story (at Newsforge) says you can list your Open Source business, non-profit group or Open Source project or whatever for free in a 'Who's Who and Who's Doing What in Open Source' book that's being distributed to government agencies on March 15. The deadline's March 1, so better act fast." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN. Remember to keep your write-up suitable for pointy-headed managers...
The tin-foil hat brigade may want to bear in mind that Ashcroft, Tenet, Rumsfeld etc. may also take an interest in "Who's Who and Who's Doing What in Open Source" ;-)
This is interresting for several reasons beyond the obvious; The government is now making information available about open source, which means they know it exists. This information will also get reviewed by government agencies and could possibly lead to more open source adoption by government agencies, which would encourage more people in the population to be exposed to OSS. This also gives some air of credibility to open source, possibly the kind that suits will catch on to it and adopt OSS more.
Hmm, I sure hope they're looking at other OS stuff rather than just Apache and Mozilla, which always seem to hog the spotlight.
Mozilla's not even that good anyway (I use Mac/Chimera/Outlook).
Sometimes some of my biggest battles in adopting OSS in the gov't/DoD are convincing my fellow engineers. These are old school engineer types who are very scared of change. Even if it sounds reasonable, there better be a damn good reason to change to something new, especially something as "untested" as OSS.
Last I heard, open source "threatens capitalism". Are we adding ourselves to a black-list?
Don't get involved in strong-encryption anonymous peer-to-peer projects, particularly those with any sort of anti-DMCA capability, within the United States. And if I do this outside the United States, don't then visit the United States.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Yup, and just cause they're out to get you doesn't mean you're not also paranoid, something I wish more people would consider once in a while
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
...in your efforts to get more spam.
Warning: this is a little off-topic, but it is an issue I am concerned about.
I hope you're being sarcastic, since Open Source software has nothing to do with threatening capitalism. In fact, I would argue that OSS is in the spirit of capitalism!
At its core, capitalism is about minimizing costs of creating and distributing resources through competition. Risk is one of those costs, yet OSS reduces those risks when compared with other proprietary solutions. No large-scale software projects are free of bugs, so a risk of using any software is the stability of the creator. The firm may go out of business; the software may be discontinued; or the firm may charge more over time. OSS can be developed indefinitely, even after the original creators can not be relied upon to maintain it at a reasonable price. That is the value of the source code.
What are the advantages of open, Free (as in Freedom) code? One problem with any software includes the development costs of programmers and the project's administration. A firm could hire programmers to create code under any license (open or closed) requested, but these costs can be huge for large-scale projects (the projects from the above paragraph). It makes sense that if programming resources could be spread throughout the marketplace, then an individual firm's cost of software maintenance could be reduced to feasible levels. But how does one firm encourage its competitors to cooperate with it? The answer are open standards. For over two hundred years, it has been shown that common, open standards - such as money values, weights and measures, or product specifications, among others - help reduce costs as a whole in a market. (Note that when the price of a product is determined more by demand than supply, then this translates into higher profits.) By allowing the source code of a software application to be open and free from abuse by any one firm (hence, Free), then the code gains the advantages of open standards. The contributions by one firm can't be stolen by another firm, and additional restrictions and costs - like royalties or other fees - can't be levied by any one firm. Hence, Free OSS is more economical than proprietary closed source software for large, complicated projects.
But does the sharing of code go against capitalism? No! There is competition between open source software projects (such as Gnome vs. KDE, Mozilla vs. Konqueror, Linux vs. BSD). The market forces help streamline the administration/design of any individual projects, or it will be dominated by others and eventually become irrelevant. The users of OSS lower their individual costs and become more competitive in their respective markets. (For instance, OSS lowers IBM's costs of maintaining software. They can't really sell it, but IBM gets their money back - and more - by selling their experience with the software!) Thus, Open Source software lets firms be more competitive.
Note that some software projects are either too small or too big to be economically Open Source. The market may not be large enough to support the costs of the program (such as large databases like encyclopedias, or complex programs like robotic control software). On the other hand, there might not be enough interest in other projects (such as program documentation, which is generally poor in the open source community). Still other types of software may be the product (such as entertainment software like games or web-logging tools, or other commercial software such as p2p clients). Despite these limits, a lot of software could be economically Free OSS in a capitalistic society. Of course, others could be fueled by volunteer efforts for which we should be more grateful.
Please accept my apologizes for this rather long, rambling rant. I get worked up sometimes: I hope you understand. :-)
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
If you view the html source on their web page you'll see they used javascript.
Isn't javascript proprietary?