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Governments & Open Source
sydney-computer-support writes "The Greens in New Zealand who advocate the use of OSS are upset about a Novell contract because it doesn't support open source. The article mentions the greens spokeperson saying
the contract "cleared the path for government agencies to adopt and expand their use of non-proprietary software" -- failing to note that Novell is a company offering proprietary versions of OSS."
What makes Red Hat and SUSE proprietary Linux?
Red Hat was the a huge supporter of OSS and one of the last distros to always release a completely free version of their OS, now they only give it away to hobbiests and openly release all their developments before the paying customers get them.
Novel releases an OSS version of its OS and is also a big supporter of OSS, arguably bigger than SUSE who had taken a turn for the worse towards the end.
The only problem with Novell could be the use of their directory, but that is not a proprietary version of OSS, it is proprietary software that runs on OSS.
I think (as you seem to, this is not an attack on you, but on the greens) converting over to SUSE or Red Hat both fall into the category of "[clearing] the path for government agencies to adopt and expand their use of non-proprietary software"
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The /. lead-in completely misrepresents the article in question. Had the submitter actually read TFA, he would know that the Greens are actually very excited about the deal. The quotes from Gren spokespersons cover a lot of the standard ground for OSS advocacy. However, the article in question was written for the National Business review, and is primarily a "debunking" of OSS, and of the Greens' enthusiasm for open solutions.
Sorry but you shouldn't believe everything you read.
The Red Hat Enterprise distribution includes some trademarks, logos and what not, but it is in no way proprietary. You can download all the source code directly from Red Hat's own ftp servers for free. And you can even create your own linux distribution based off the source, however, you must remove the trademark logos and what not before you distribute as you are not Red Hat.
If you don't believe then try checking out http://centos.org/
Or just peruse the Red Hat website and read their licensing agreements for their products.
It seems you've bought into FUD spread by both the anti-OSS crowd saying "...Red Hat is no different, its proprietary just like Windows..." and the Red Hat bashing linux elitists "...Red Hat is the next Microsoft, they took our linux and made it proprietary...". Its all BS.
burnin
Dimitri Sklyarov was arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada for writing software while in Russia which decoded e-books which were a form of Adobe PDFs.
Right, because he broke the trivial encryption on encrypted PDFs. He could just as easily be arrested for breaking encryption on text files. That does not make either PDF or TXT closed formats. Both are open, published, and have multiple implementations of readers and writers. .DOC, on the other hand, is not only closed, but also ever changing and intentionally obscured. Yup Adobe are a bunch of asshats and should be slapped around, but that has nothing to do with the PDF format which they created and in no way makes PDFs less open.