New Zealand Government Open Source with Novell

quikflik writes "New Zealand Computerworld magazine reports an 'All-of-government' open source deal with Novell. The deal allows government agencies access to Novell Open Source software and support - and probably some other Novell products too considering the Inland Revenue Department have been using them for a while. Still .. is an incumbant vendor always the best? If you were a government, which linux distribution would you choose?"

Comments

If I were a government...

[ReformedExCon]

Well, if I were a government, I'd probably choose Redhat Linux because it is red and soft and can fit snugly on my head.

Government #2, same question.

Re:If I were a government...

[Hamilton Publius]

"SENTENCE first - VERDICT afterwards," said the Queen.

"Nonsense!" said Alice loudly.

"Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.

- Alice In Wonderland

They say Lewis Carroll was a serious dope fiend, his mind totally scrambled on opium, when he concocted "Alice in Wonderland." A place where the sentence comes first and the verdict afterward, where people who protest the madness are sentenced to death themselves - what lunacy!

If only Carroll had lived a bit longer. If only he'd visited Cuba in 1959 when every paper from the New York Times to the London Observer - when every pundit from Walter Lippman to Ed Murrow, every author from Jean Paul Sartre to Norman Mailer, every TV host from Jack Paar to Ed Sullivan were touting the judicial outrages, mass larceny and firing-squad orgies instituted by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as the most glorious events since VJ day.

"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," Carroll would have heard from the chief executioner, named Ernesto "Che" Guevara. "These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (The Wall)!"

To be fair, Ed Sullivan later recanted. He saw through the murderous farce and was not above a public act of contrition. Indeed, two years later he featured several recently liberated Bay of Pigs freedom fighters - some hobbling on crutches, others missing limbs - on his show for a fund raising where he declared them heroes and led the thunderous applause himself. I sure miss Ed Sullivan.

This from the AP [February 2004 ]:

"At The Sundance Film Festival Robert Redford's film on Che Guevara "The Motorcycle Diaries" received a standing ovation." They say this was the only film so raptly received.

For the first year of Castro's glorious revolution Che Guevara was his main executioner -- a combination Beria and Himmler, with a major exception: Che's slaughter of (bound and gagged) Cubans (Che was himself an Argentine) exceeded Heinrich Himmler's prewar slaughter of Germans -- to scale, that is.

Nazi Germany became the modern standard for political evil even before World War II. Yet in 1938, according to both William Shirer and John Toland, the Nazi regime held no more than 20,000 political prisoners. Political executions up to the time might have reached a couple thousand, and most of these were of renegade Nazis themselves during the indiscriminate butchery known as the "Night of the Long Knives." The famous Kristallnacht that horrified civilized opinion worldwide caused a grand total of 71 deaths. This in a nation of 70 million.

Cuba was a nation of 6.5 million in 1959. Within three months in power, Castro and Che had shamed the Nazi prewar incarceration and murder rate. One defector claims that Che signed 500 death warrants, another says over 600. Cuban journalist Luis Ortega, who knew Che as early as 1954, writes in his book "Yo Soy El Che!" that Guevara sent 1,897 men to the firing squad. In his book "Che Guevara: A Biography," Daniel James writes that Che himself admitted to ordering "several thousand" executions during the first few years of the Castro regime.

So the scope of the mass murder is unclear. So the exact number of widows and orphans is in dispute. So the number of gagged and blindfolded men who Che sent - without trials - to be bound to a stake and blown apart by bullets runs from the hundreds to the thousands.

But the mass executioner gets a standing ovation by the same people in the U.S who oppose capitol punishment! Is there a psychiatrist in the house?!

The first three months of the Cuban Revolution saw 568 firing squad executions. Even the New York Times admits it. The preceding "trials" shocked and nauseated all who witnessed them. They were shameless farces, sickening charades. Ask Barry Farber. He was there.

But vengeance - much less justice - had nothing to