Slashdot Mirror
Obama Looking At Open Source?
An anonymous reader writes "'The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through Open Source technologies and products.'
The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley's most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration."
The USPS is the only Government agency I can think of that actually makes a profit, albeit a small one, $45 billion industry with about $1 billion profit, but it is designed to break even. I still think that it is one of the best values out there. $0.42 and I can send a letter across the country in 3 days.
I'm not not licking toads.
Go ahead mark me troll, but have any of you seriously given thought to what will happen if open source were to become the norm and all these people were out of work, being asked to volunteer the skills they once got paid for?
Who says that Open Source has to be free? Seriously. This model is still completely misunderstood. Someone wants a specialized application for whatever ... they pay you to write it. You publish it under a license and share the code. That way you get money AND free input from the community. Sure there will be competing products that base on your code but look at the distro vendors. SuSe, Canonical, RedHat they all use more or less the same code and sell their specific very individual solutions.
I can imagine what would happen if programmers were no longer bound to huge companies by NDAs and Non-Compete agreements and all code was open: We'd get a shit ton of awesome code to work with and all the brilliant results stemming from there.
The difficult part is to change the perception of open source from the one like yours "Everything is free as in Beer and the brewer goes broke" to "Everything is free as in speech and you get paid for the quality and sustainability of your work". I wouldn't mind having companies go broke that re-release the same product year after year with little to no improvements. If there are other companies that do the job better and improve over time I guess it would only be fair. The current market is based on monopolism and power struggle between the monopolies. That's what has to change for FOSS to succeed and we need to start in the heads.
I have migrated several clueless windows users to Linux and I can say from real world experience that anyone can use Linux if all they do is browse the web. The problem comes in when people expect to do what they are able to do on windows and they cannot. This Christmas season the unexpected rared it's ugly head. My Neighbor got an Ipod and she tried to load Itunes to get her cds on her Ipod. No go. She had to call me and I had to dig into forums to get it going with Songbird. Songbird kicks ass BTW. Another user calls me up saying their daughter just gave them a digital picture frame. So they can see their grandkids. Guess what? they tried to load the software that came with it. When that didn't work they were lost and stuck. Another user called me up with a Garmin GPS that they could not update and another with a TomTom GPS that will not update on Ubuntu. Then I have one lady that brought home a perfectly good Lexmark laser printer from work. They bought a new printer and gave her that one for free. Well it won't work on her PClinuxOS. I can tell users till I am blue in the face to do their research before they get hardware for the Linux PCs but I can't control the presents and gifts that others buy them. This is a BIG problem. I keep getting asked "Why won't iTunes work on Linux? It works on windows?" On the flip side, a nursing home near me got 8 PCs donated to them. I got there to install them and they had pirated versions of WinXP with a message "This version of windows is not genuine" etc. I told them to buy WinXP pro for 8 computers at $199.00 each plus AV etc. They balked at the price tag so I put Ubuntu on all the the PCs. They called me 2 months later. They had 2 more WinXP PCs donated to them. But they had Legit versions of XP on them and were pretty clean of crapware so I told them I'll just connect the PCs as is and I did. They called me back a month later complaining about the 2 windows PCs. What was the complaint? The residents "Old people" did not want to use the windows PCs because they were already used to the Ubuntu PCs and said "It was too hard" compared to Ubuntu "Icons were too small" "Cannot zoom desktop"(compiz zoom feature) etc etc. The list went on and on. The elderly residents just could not go from Ubuntu to windows after using it for just 2 months. No one would go near the windows PCs. so I had to go back and wipe perfectly legitimate versions of XP of the 2 boxes and put Linux on those too.