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Open Source in California Government
catfoo writes "California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has recently posted the California Performance Review Report, a 2,500 page plan to overhaul state government and save $32 billion over the next five years. Part of the proposal: Open Source alternatives. Imagine that..."
Second-to-last sentence from the body of the link:
Looking to the open source community for applications that serve the same function as closed source solutions may cause vendors to be more flexible with pricing and licensing structures.
But the rest of the report makes a very strong case for the adoption of Open Source, including a couple of figures naming savings already known to have been made by California state agencies.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
He doesn't have to read it (but I'll bet he's at least been briefed on it). He doesn't even have to understand all of it -- that is what delegation is all about. Since we use the democratic method to elect leaders, not their cabinets, we might as well elect people who are good leaders and who we think will select and lead a good cabinet. After that, governors and presidents are mostly figureheads, not policy or decision makers. If we could find someone who could completely understand health care, welfare reform, social security, taxation, the military, space research, etc, I'd be all for electing them. But such a person doesn't exist, and if they do likely they have incredible social problems from having spent all their time in the library learning all this stuff.
But I think you grossly underestimate Arnold if you don't think he has some sense of policy, especially this one. He's been talking about the waste in the government for quite some time now, and ran on a platform of getting rid of the waste -- not the programs.
MORTAR COMBAT!
Oh! You mean make money creating FOSS. Why the hell should 99% of the business world worry about that? They're not writing software, they're using software.
I love how these crazy meme is going around 'No one can make money from FOSS, therefore it won't catch on.'. Well, no one makes money from selling air, but, interestingly enough, we continue to use it.
No one sits down and goes 'Well, I could chose A or B, but B is cheaper and won't make other people as much money, so I better choose A.', and the idea they do is rather surreal.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
The original #9 on Mr. Perens' website("The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software.") is longer, and clearly GPL friendly; he goes out of his way to state that the GPL is in fact compliant with #9.
The report version is shorter with no explanation, and actually uses different phrasing: "License must not contaminate other software".
Sound familiar?