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MS Rails On Open Source, Appeals To Gov't Greed
Bill Harper writes "Open source software is a 'waste of money,' a Microsoft executive has said. He goes on to say that governments planning to use it will damage their own economies and that giving away source code is shooting yourself in the foot. What's interesting though is that this is just the latest in a series of nonsense arguments put forward by MS in Asia because it's scared of Linux stealing the market. An early one was that open-source software is anti-competitive!" Funny thing is, the MS executive (Chris Sharp) used to work for Red Hat.
"Funny thing is, the MS executive (Chris Sharp) used to work for Red Hat."
Funny? It's scary more than anything, as it'll just make what he says seem more 'credible'. Of course, he's just some greedy bastard, and it's good to see him not working for an OSS company anymore, but it doesn't help Linux much in this propaganda campaign.
the painful lesson that they will have to transform from a company that create standards to being one that contributes to them.
They honestly believe that having tons of cash will buy them anything but open standards and architecture eventually win out. They always have, they always will. They are just throwing up their arms in exaperation because they just don't get it. They will,..soon enough
Doesn't Microsoft also claim that their software shouldn't be used in mission-critical systems? Wouldn't you think that government systems quality (usually) as mission-critical?
Hooray for hypocracy.
...so that's why they named it C#!
webpage
governments planning to use it will damage their own economies
...And governments using MS products aren't damaging their own economies by exposing themselves to 31337 h4x0rz, virii, spyware, seineewerasreenigneepacsten style backdoors, and other closed source, proprietary crap that only Microsoft can spoonfeed to us?
*rubs index finger and thumb together* This is the worlds smallest violin, playing a sad, sad song for you, Microsoft.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Is that "waste of money" like in beer?
Can "free" be a waste of money...
The "waste of money" argument does not hold water. Instead of the government earning X% on the profits of closed-source companies, every dollar spent by anyone on OSS development is potentially a dollar the government doesn't need to spend, and that the community does not need to duplicate by spending said dollar.
From the government's point of view, the ROI on OSS is orders of magnitude greater than that of closed-source software.
It's a vastly more efficient utilisation of resources.
'"If you are compelled to give back to the community, then you don't have the opportunity to benefit from that knowledge,"'
-Chris Sharp
translated:
f**ck you all. We're only here for the money.
And if you want to start a company in this world and make money while giving away source code, go right ahead. Lots of companies are doing just fine that way. It's only the proprietary, lock-em-up, IP theft is a crime!, sign this NDA! crowd that will fall further and further back.
Its NOT funny that he came from Red Hat. It will lend some 'creditability' to his words, in the public's eye.
"See...he had to move to Microsoft to make an income and not work for one of those evil/stupid 'Linux companies'".
Microsoft's marketing machine is in full motion these days, and we are taking a beating beacuse of it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
MS sounds like tired old prostitute complaining about women that give it away.
Open source is a good source of business revenues if you're in a country with cheap labor where you can more or less limitlessly hire support people.
If you're in a country where the labor is more or less expensive, and moreover if your employees are not support people but software engineers, then the financial outlook is questionable. For people and companies not wanting to move into cheap support, but stay in higher-paid research and software development going into open source does not make a whole lot of sense.
The government should care little about the source. They should mandate open standards. If you decide that your document standard will be the OpenOffice Writer XML-based standard, documented and open, then you can use either OpenOffice Writer for that (free) or any closed source utility that will save to desired format, but perhaps offer some other advantages.
I think I have met him once at a RedHat presentation in Sydney - he wasn't terrribly open source centric back then either.
I think it's probabaly a fallacy to think that the RedHat managers are open source evangelists - they are more "executives" than evangelists.
Even the current local RedHat CEO doesn't come across as your typical oss advocate. They are more business driven (perhaps unfortunately - perhaps not, depends on your view).
Jon - TheSpork
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
After reading this article, it sounds like Microsoft, atleast in the Asia-Pacific region, does not have any advantage in the market over OSS.
Perhaps its about time for Microsoft to realize the playing field has changed and it should figure out (like IBM, Novell, etc..) how to utilize OSS instead of trying to fight it.
He goes on to say that governments planning to use it will damage their own economies and that giving away source code is shooting yourself in the foot. Though I distinctly remember a few hundred government PCs running Windows 2000 going offline for days this summer in Philadelphia City Hall after MS Blast was first rampid, while all Linux boxes were fine. If practically "self-imposing" a shot, to continue the analogy, isn't what occured by the government using Windows boxes unpatched, fully aware of their dangers, then I don't know what is. Also, IIRC, most Gov Linux distros are heftly modified;governemts are smart enough to not just run a freshly-downloaded distro. Matter of fact, the NSA developed their own Linux distro which highyly encorporates VMware, which I was a bit ago.
Really? Huh. So tell me again... as a Microsoft marketing strategist, when you look at me, what do you see?
In my part of SE Asia, piracy must be a very powerful ally of M$. People have grown so accustomed to M$ products and proggies running on windows 'cos they know where they can get them - and they've all been so "trained" in them cos of their "availability". And I would think that much of the general comp literacy in the region is due to this ally - I wouldn't be surprised if M$ sees this region as rather "safe" since Linux is kind of a "hardcore" "server" "alternative" solution.
oh yes i must also mention that after all those years of "free education", M$ started "cleaning up" several years back. Talk about traitors.
And by God, if anyone can recognize a waste of a customer's money it's Microsoft!
...they just don't get it.
They don't get it? Hell, I'm the one that doesn't get it! What is it beyond the 50 billion(not that this money actually exists) in the bank that they want?? This is all very psychotic to me. Dudes, cash out, hit the Riviera, French, Mexican, Mayan, whatever. They must be doing this for a good laugh, watching us wetting our pants everytime they speak. There's just no other reason. Maybe it's some "wag the dog" thing. What are they distracting us from?
What?
One minor quibble. Microsoft doesn't create standards, they impose them.
At least it's good for the US's economy. M$ is basically funnelling money from around the world back into the US, which has a lot to do with why the rest of the world (at least EU, Latin America and Asia) are so hyped about an alternative. Especially nowadays with Bush increasing anti-American sentiment like never before seen.
In that sense if a non-programmer wants to help the FOSS movement then translating a how-to, a man page or something else is a great way.
Lest we forget, Microsoft has at least one OpenSource project. While copyright, and restricted use, microsoft has many, many example source programs on MSDN as well. Not GPL, but certainly open (as in viewable and modifiable) source.
MS seems to fairly regularly confuse say "this is good/bad for consumers" when it really means "this is good/bad for Microsoft". Do they knowingly take MS-internal-only presentations and show them to the public as normal business?
A statement such as "With open source, there is no way to make more software" may make sense to a bunch of coders inside of Microsoft, but it's so obviously stupid outside of that context that it doesn't even survive cursory analysis.
Could they actually define at what point this "no way to make more software" statement has/will kick in? Was it after Linux was released in 1991? After Apache was released a year or so later? Maybe OOo was the last piece of software that could be produced? Is it happening right now, and the code that's being developed at the moment can't be finished? Maybe it's in the future sometime; I'd really like to know the date that it's gonna occur so I can get into another industry beforehand.
Idiots
wait a minute!
when you install your copy of XP professional where is your support agreement...
YOU DONT HAVE ONE. Microsoft does not profide free support when you buy their OS you have to pay for support. JUST LIKE LINUX.
I dont know where this myth that microsoft OS has syupport built in comes from but everyone in the business that works with MS operating systems knows that MS support comes with a very large price tag and is never EVER free.
XP=$300.00 PLus a support agreement price... Linux= $0.00 plus a support agreement price..
even if Mandrake or Suse/Novell support was the same price as MS support (it isn't... it's cheaper) you are STILL ahead by $300.00 + the cost of the Office Suite + the cost of the server seat licenses + the cost of the assorted support software that comes free with the linux distro and is supported by the linux vendor.
the cost of support that is supposedly attached to linux is also there for Windows. nobody ever seems to mention that... or they somehow forget that HUGE bill they pay to MS for that support agreement they signed.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
in related news, health food causes cancer, according to a McDonalds spokesperson
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
Here's is a google cache copy of an interview that Chris Sharp gave just before the release of Red Hat 8 touting that RHCE are the highest trained professionals in IT.
This space for rent. Contact for our rates.
"Yes, yes, you Americans have very large penis!"
.. then duly ignore the stupid American who is trying to tell them how to run their country and go off and do precisely whatever it was that they intended to do before the stupid American started mouthing off.
I just love the way Asian folks do business. It varies a bit from country to country of course, but generally, they'll make a nice polite show of pretending to give a shit about the rubbish the stupid American is spouting, then go quietly back to whatever they were doing before, unmoved. It's fun to watch the religous types pushing their word in Chinatown anywhere. The victims listen politely, nod and smile, and go on their way. The religious types read the situation to mean that because (a) no-one told them to f*ck right off, and (b) someone nodded and smiled at them, that they're getting their message through. This is why Chinatown precincts are always more clogged with religous freaks than elsewhere in any given city.
Here in Sydney, Australia it's generally the Morons pushing their false religion with their stilted crash-course Chinese. They're incapable of picking what nationality any given Asian person is, so they try to talk to everyone in Mandarin Chinese (very few people actually speak Mandarin here in Sydney, it's a predominantly Cantonese thing here). It's amusing to wander along 10 metres behind them, watching them greet random people with their "Ni Hao" and a big cheesy smile and all the wrong intonations, and watch the victims return the greeting with a polite nod and smile, then crack up laughing once the Morons (mormons?) have passed!
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Sending money to Redmond, Washington, United States does not help your economy, unless you are in Redmond, or to a lesser degree in Washington State.
It's good for the economy when things like steel and coal and fabric gets cheaper, because it means a better standard of living for consumers. Businesses also become more efficient; when their raw material costs go down, they either make more money or drop prices, both of which are good for the local economy.
So if cheaper steel is good, why on earth is cheaper software bad?
But Microsoft is trying to assert that if you wnt any chance of growing your own Microsoft, you need a strong IP regime.
But the simple fact is that there will be no new Microsofts. The existing one will make very sure of that. Only people who completely change the rules and play a different game entirely can hope to succeed against a compaany with half the money in the world.
If your local economy actually DID 'hit gold' and come up with a wonderful new software idea, it's virtually certain that Microsoft would simply subsume it into Windows. This has happened many times over the last twenty years; Microsoft has put company after company out of business by leveraging Windows. (Stacker, Quarterdeck, Lotus 1-2-3, Netscape... the list goes on and on.) The Windows software ecosystem has very little diversity; there are a few big companies and a lot of small ones, but very very few midsize ones. The sharks eat them instead and get bigger.
In other words, with Microsoft already existing in the world, the chance of creating your own local Microsoft is ZERO. The creation of the closed source software industry was a very special event that will only happen once; it will not be repeated.
There can still be small software niches, of course, ones that are too small for Microsoft to bother with. But if you grant that you most likely can't make huge piles of money, why not give away the code for free and sell services and support instead?
As a government, why not encourage consulting-type technology businesses like this? Service businesses can make very comfortable amounts of money. While they don't have the huge potential upside of being able to sell, over and over again, a product that costs them nothing to duplicate, they don't really have that upside ANYWAY because of Microsoft. The open-source industry is still forming, and there's lots and lots of room for new companies.
If you REALLY want to help your economy out, get behind open source and PUSH. Your local government spending $5,000/year for local companies to support and fix their Linux servers is a HELL of a lot better for your economy than is sending a check to Microsoft. Money that goes to Redmond is gone; money that is spent locally stays in your local economy.
Now, if Microsoft offered solutions that were wildly better than their open-source counterparts, it might make financial and economic sense to buy Windows. If you can be twice as productive, say, on a Windows box, and the total cost of Windows is less than twice that of Linux, then it's an overall win to buy Windows. I'm setting aside control and forced upgrade issues, along with many others, but economics is ultimately about cost, and you can abstract all those factors into cost of ownership.
But if, as I believe, Windows' overall advantage over Linux is slim at best, then it's just wasteful to send money to Redmond when you can spend it locally instead.
There's one other scenario, too... you may be so technically savvy you that you don't NEED support. In that case, you you can drop your computing cost to ZERO. This is STILL better for the local economy, because that $200 you don't send to Redmond is money you can spend at the county fair.
In a world with free alternatives, paying for Windows is very much like a tax. Taxes are always harmful (at least directly) to an economy, because it's wasted money...profit that didn't get reinvested.
I've lost track, was that the study Microsoft did, or the one they paid for or both?
Uhm, actually no. Mozilla IS netscape, just a few genereations and a name change later, with much more added to it. And the relationship between Open Office and Star Office is mostly the same.
The exception being the one about Unix. Wich is not to good a point as Linux is a POSIX compliant os same as Unix.
Of course you are almost certainly a 3rd rate troll, or just possibly a employee of a comercial company threatened by OSS who failed to do his/her research and is now sitting there with egg on his face.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Seriously, selling products for less in other countries encourages businesses to leave the united states.
I can't blame a company who outsources work to another country because its less expensive.
I can BLAME an American company who intentionally lowers prices in other countries and rapes us here in the states.
'"If you are compelled to give back to the community, then you don't have the opportunity to benefit from that knowledge,"'
-Chris Sharp
This statement is absolutely spot on. After all, what benefits could possibly come from sharing information and knowledge?
The same argument should be used to end the cheap/free distribution of HIV drugs in Africa. After all, who benefits from research into saving lives if those lives are saved without reasonable profit margins?
In fact we should put an immediate end to free condom distrubution, because somebody had to work very hard indeed to come up with the design of the resevoir tip. Nobody benefits from condoms, especially free ones.
Libraries should also be dismantled and the books therein burned. If you want the information, you should have to buy the books, because otherwise nobody benefits.
As a former teacher of English in the developing world I am appaled at my own past behaviour of occasionally offering language instruction for free. Clearly nobody at all has benefited from this compulsion to 'give back to the community'.
I fully agree with Mr Sharp (with his delightfully descriptive name) that all information should be propriatary.
If someone wants to know, for example, how I am on any given day, I simply tell them that the information belongs to me, but I offer a range of scalable licensing plans to allow access to that information. Who could possibly benefit from me saying 'I am well' without proper remuneration?
Unsecure research, open communication, and 'giving back to the community' have done nothing since the beginning of time except stifle innovation and harm consumers' interests.
As a result of my new dedication to Knowlege (TM), I am pleased to offer the following innovative products that no consumer can do without:
I Am Well (TM)
Making Fire (TM)
Boiling Leaves to Make a Tasty Beverage (TM)
Conveying Heavy Objects More Easily with Narrow Cylinders (TM)
Making Pleasing Sounds by Striking Membranes under Tension (TM)
Futher products are in developent.
Governments are in a position to establish vendor neutral specs that could dominate the industry. If the IRS established XML specs for tax forms (rather than letting Intuit or another vendor dictate proprietary formats as the standards) then they can drive real competetion for good software that implements the standards. If this sort of thing expands it could make communication of data about patents, censuses, and parking tickets as easy to find as looking up a zip code is online today.
Governments don't seem to recognize that by giving power to the little dictators and their proprietary products they are ceding their own power as the neutral referee and protector of their people.
A few years ago I was one of a bunch of religious freaks who hit Sydney's Chinatown. Fantastic location. We didn't pretend to speak Chinese--in fact, we did our thing with some simple street theatre and a couple of really cool dance routines. We had a crowd of people watching, and some of the local businesses even gave us lunch because we were getting business for them!
If anyone wanted to talk about what we had presented, that was up to them. If people wanted to watch the concert and leave, that was fine too. We did the same thing in King's Cross and Darling Harbour.
What wrecked it was the freaks who followed us. The moment they started with their fake Chinese and bible bashing, people ran. We actually gave away over a hundred Bibles that day, and people seemed pleased with what they got. These other idiots didn't get to base one.
The moral of the story is that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. We said what we had to say in a non-confrontational way, and moved on. Everyone was happy. Go out of your way to offend, and end up going backwards.
This applies to the Linux evangelists as well as anything else. I can't stand Windows or anything else by MS (apart from their mice!) But I've found the easiest way to get people thinking about changing over to the Light Side is to use Linux, maybe show off a little bit, and know what the differences are. When people get interested, I can explain the benefits, and give them a copy of Knoppix. Easy. By treating people as human beings instead of targets to be hit everyone benefits.
Cogito, ergo sig.
Microsoft's value proposition is product based, i.e. sell lots of units of software product to make profit.
:-). I won't go political.
OSS value proposition is service based. Give the software away, and provide services, consulting etc. to help companies deploy and use the software. Companies may get support from either internal and/or external resources - either way they cost $.
Note: You still need services for product based vendors.
IBM (and others) have a hybrid model, services and software product sales. IBM get much more revenue from services than they do from software product. Interestingly, IBM will heavily discount there products (80%) in competetive situtaions - guess what? they want the service revenue!
Which model wins in the long run? The market will eventually sort that out.
Assuming that a service based model wins, then product oriented companies will fail: Which is why M$ are poohing their pants on this issue.
The basic economic free market model for OSS assumes a service based model. In fact for OSS to really work, it needs a really free market. Software patents are a really big risk for OSS, praticularly where the granted patent is for the trivial (one click, scroll bars, progress bars etc.)
Now we talk free market - we get political (where are Stallman and Raymeond when u need them
You want a signature? You can't handle a signature!!
I'm trying to argue both sides here - but Microsoft does offer free support and such free, comprehensive Linux support doesn't exist.
I call bullshit.
Microsoft's knowledge base is nice, yes, but honestly, it's there out of strict necessity. And it's not as good as Google anyway. For both Linux and Windows, Google is the way to go.
If you have a real problem with Windows, it won't be on support.microsoft.com, it'll be on Google. Probably Google Groups. And probably with a bunch of people with titles like "Microsoft MVP" chiming in with their two pence, all wrong and clueless. Guess why? Because nobody knows how the software works. And these real problems don't get solved.
How do you solve the problems? By calling up Microsoft. They'll charge you hundreds of dollars, to be refunded if they decide it's a bug in their software. You will be on hold for hours on end, and their support is far from helpful.
I spent over six months with Microsoft support on a single issue a few years ago; I still see the problem today, so their solution obviously didn't work, but we just learn to live with the problem.
More recently we experienced a bug with Windows 2000 Server SP4; it just kept rebooting randomly. Turns out this stems from a fix of a vulnerability in SP3 and below. Microsoft support was useless and to my knowledge they haven't actually fixed the new bug. Google Groups, on the other hand, helped us find the problem (we just use SP3 now, vulnerability and all).
I've set up GNU/Linux in mission-critical situations. When problems come up, IRC or Google or Google Groups has always had the answer. The three have a combined 100% track record. Why? Because the developers listen, and if not, you can always look at the source code. (You'd be surprised how easy it is to find the problem in the source code going by nothing more than an error message.)
In my experience, GNU/Linux support costs all of $0. But if I had a scary manager who wanted support, I could always recommend one of the zillions of companies selling Linux support. I doubt any would be as good as newsgroups, but they can't hurt. They'd certainly be more helpful than Microsoft, since in my experience Microsoft support is nothing more than a waste of time and patience.
Thought that would get your attention :)
Let me explain my reasoning:
Ok, initially, the majority of open source development was dev support based (libraries, support and development applications...and a few OSes). However now there is a plethora of open source work being done in the application domain. Writing open source applications puts companies out of business. I'm not arguing if that's right or wrong yet, just stating fact. I write an application, sell it...someone comes along and starts giving it away...I go out of business (generally).
So, where does selfish come into it. One developer, who doesn't have to worry about the other parts of software development (administration, quality control, iso certification etc) because he's giving his product away, develops a product simply for the glory of it and maybe some cash in support money. If the application get's big, maybe he makes enough money to be well off from support and on the conference circuit.
Now, if he'd had the courage to take a chance and develop his software as a going concern...and it took off...he would be building something bigger than himself. A company that supplies income to many, perhaps even 1000s one day, employees and their families. But instead, he puts a company out of business (or at the least reduces market share)...all for his glory he puts 100s of families out of work. Sounds pretty selfish to me.
p.s. I'm now a microsoft nut, and do contribute regularly to several open source projects (library projects). I just think open sourcing applications of every variety is going to end up killing our industry
I thought I read fairly recently that custom software development for specific businesses was still the largest paying sector in the IT world in the US. Open standards mean more jobs for us slashdot nerds! Case in point: I wrote the first version of the Quality Assurance database at my work in VB because I already knew it, and it was fast and easy. I got promoted (largely because of my badass database!) and got my own desk and everything! Guess what, that desk had it's own computer, I wouldn't want to piss off the BSA, and I certainly didn't want to buy another copy of VB (one of the techs was making nicer UI's for the DB so I couldn't just uninstall) so I went python(I friggin love that lang BTW) and now I am writing version 3.0(don't ask) entirely in Python and it will friggin rock. I could confidently say that open source software has not only provided me with the tools to be incredibly productive, but given my employer a productivity boost to go along with it.(we used to write the test data on paper and have the night tech enter it into an Access DB which took at least an hour a night) Not to mention that it will ensure that some python kiddie gets a job when I leave. How could this possibly be a bad thing???
governments that standardise on open-source software are hurting their local software vendors as they can't make the money needed to invest in their own software products.
You'd expect a government to buy direct. The only "local" software vendor here is Microsoft.
building open-source software is a "waste of money" and that a company was in effect giving away its intellectual property, preventing it from getting future benefits. "If you are compelled to give back to the community, then you don't have the opportunity to benefit from that knowledge,"
Their benefits are (1) The free use of software that they CAN imrove on, (2) The use of those improvements in their own line of business (If you need a new feature or bugfix in a commercial product, your options are limited, as in your only option is to wait and see), and (3) The use of improvements made by businesses who are using the software because of your improvements. Etc.
even companies that support open source are just as motivated by commercial interests as any other commercial software vendor.
Yeah, what's wrong with expecting a little well earned profit?
Intellectual property rights fuel sustained innovation
Need is a pretty big motivation to innovate. Some call it the root of all invention. You keep your IP rights, enough to relicense and enforce against commercial pirates. And open source won't prohibit you from making commercial software, on your own, and seeing how far those IP rights get you when nobody wants to pay to use your software because you're competing with Microsoft. And how was 15 years of DOS, an OS that was a decade outdated when it was created, defended heavily by litigation and anti-competitive tactics, and based entirely on the works of others any without credit or compensation, a shining example of innovation fueled by IP rights? Quite the opposite.
Or what about the fear of patent litigation if I invent something that someone else invented independently? Non-innovators need not worry about such things.
With open source, there is no way to make more software
??? With FUD, there is no way to make more sense?
Open Source has NO interest in MS except with regard to APIs and protocols to enable OSS to talk with proprietary MS protocols. Other than that, OSS does not care that MS exists or not, it has no interest in defeating MS is some kind of software war and is here to stay whether MS like it or not.
MS should now accept this, just like they had to finally accept that TCP/IP became the globally accepted way of networking computers together about 10 - 15 years ago.
A rational adult company would recognise that it now has some serious competition for market share and would begin to take positive steps to secure its userbase - for starters, spending some of those huge cash reserves to improve the products that are out there already, make them better and more secure and, yes, lower their prices to make them more value for money.
Additionally, an adult company would accept that it's products have to work with competitors products and take action to ensure that (some of) its APIs are open or that it adopts more open standards within its products.
The problem is that at the moment, the only damage MS is doing is to itself. This "spoilt brat" behaviour is lowering its public image even more and giving some of its customers another excuse to adopt OSS in favour of its own products.
My personal belief is that MS are very close to having to adopt a major tactic change (for the better) in order to stay in business in the future (and they know it). I'm sure that very soon we'll see the patent litigations start against the likes of SAMBA and those that built FAT/NTFS support into the kernel but I really don't see how backwards engineering will be seen as infringing a patent when tested in court - I also suspect (and hope) that one or more of the big Linux players (IBM?) will step forward with the money for OSS to fight these litigations - if not, then I believe the community itself will find ways of raising money to fight them. After all the court cases are done, MS will just be perceived as inflexible and (more) arrogant and lose more customers as a result.
The article just indicates how desperate MS are getting (in terms of trying to stop OSS) and very soon they'll realise that they just have to accept it and work with it or give up with software completely.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Taxes tend to have a negative effect on the growth of the economy. You have to have some taxes or you can't run a government at all, and there are certainly important programs that must be funded, but governements should try to save money wherever possible. If I'm not giving my money to the governement, I'll spend it myself, and I'll spend it on things that will drive the economy towards making more goods that I want to purchase.
I'm no economist, but I believe that when governments decide where the money gets spent, you create artificial economies that can collapse when political tides change. There are buying fads as well, but I believe they have less of a deterimental effect on the economy.
By investing in Open Source solutions for software, governments help create a body of software that can be used by all other governments. Keeping it open gives us a way to directly help governments in smaller countries by making top quality software available for them. This is all done without any extra cost. It's sort of foriegn aid as a by-product of smart shoping on our governments part. Since most governments face similar organizational problems, there is bound to be tremendous overlap in the software requirements they all have.
Open Source software is more secure, in general, than commercial softare because it is open to public scrutiny and analysis. I think it's frightening to imagine viruses taking over government computers and opening them up to manipulation by criminals. It seems that creates all sorts of potential problems that are best avoided.
In summary, I think that the best decision any government can make is to use Open Source Software whenever it meets the requirements of the situation. It's the best thing for the economy and for the taxpayers.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
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