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New Coalition To Promote OSS To Feds
LinuxScribe writes "Red Hat, Mozilla, Novell, Oracle, and Sun are among the 50-plus member Open Source for America coalition that will be officially announced today by Tim O'Reilly at OSCON. The OSA will be a strong advocate for free and open source software, and plans to boost US Federal government support and adoption of FOSS. From their website: 'The mission of OSA is to educate decision makers in the US Federal government about the advantages of using free and open source software; to encourage the Federal agencies to give equal priority to procuring free and open source software in all of their procurement decisions; and generally provide an effective voice to the US Federal government on behalf of the open source software community, private industry, academia, and other non-profits.'"
If you get the government too enthused about Free Software they may decide to "help" it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Find an OSS replacement that can do what Active Directory, BitLocker, and Exchange can do, and a lot of companies would jump to it.
Bitlocker != loopback mounted encryption or TrueCrypt. BitLocker has two advantages over standard FDE systems. First, since it uses a TPM chip, it requires no passwords or supervised access at boot time (unless configured explictly to do so). This allows people to log onto a machine as a user, but have no access to other user's items, even if they pull out a recovery CD and reboot the machine. The second BitLocker advantage is that it detects tampering. With existing FDE systems, one can replace binaries with keyloggers, and nobody would notice. BitLocker, the TPM would notice a different value and not return a decryption key.
And TrouSers or tboot is a nice proof of concept, but nowhere near a workable solution that can be used.
Exchange forces companies to use AD, and once a company has an AD infrastructure, there is no point in using OpenLDAP or another directory structure.
1. Create open source software
2. Promote it to money grubbing politicians
3. ????
4. Non-profit!
which is totally what she said
The federal government has no bias against using open source software. There are two major factors that affect it:
1) Someone has to pay to get FOSS put through an evaluation process to be verified for suitability and safety (commercial vendors often pay this or coordinate with a contracting firm). This fee can be hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it applies to every component that has not been previously approved. If you bring in 5 Java FOSS libraries that haven't been used before, you could be looking at as much as a $3M cost to get them certified.
2) Versions have to be done more carefully. To most federal agencies, KDE 3.0, 3.5, 4.0 and 4.1 would be distinct versions each requiring evaluation. Microsoft has an advantage over desktop Linux in that respect since it releases Windows updates every few years, and service packs can be evaluated at everyone's convenience.
Title of this reply refers to what an old boss said, not any reality of truth. I worked for a public entity at one point, and the CIO was 110% against any sort of linux or "free" software, based on his notion that these free solutions could offer no support in times of trouble. Despite trying to explain that many larger distro's had enterprise editions that you could in fact get support for, plus a very large community of users that also could help support it, none of this would sway him away from his notion that if you weren't paying through the nose the product just wouldn't be up to standards. What a joke!
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
All of the companies named form an orchestra, working within the musical system, and playing a capitalistic tune.
In that metaphor, the FSF is a highland bagpipe. Yeah, it's music, but it simply doesn't play well with others.
The FSF plays in one octave with no rests, and literally marches off to its own 4/4 tune, while the rest of the orchestra sits there wondering.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Only they won't have any money . . .
Well a quick scan of revenues on Wikipedia puts the named corporations' annual revenues last year at over USD24 Billion. Small change to you no doubt but probably enough to bend an ear or two in Washington DC.
until now the USA has like almost 20 little aircraft carriers about the same size as the 2 the British operate
Note: an LPD has an entirely different mission from a carrier. The Nimitz etc. is designed to transport air power anywhere in the world. LPDs and other similar classes are basically troop transports. If you need to provide air superiority, an LPD would be nearly worthless as they don't really carry anything more offensive than a few Harriers. If you need to deliver a few thousand Marines to a beach somewhere, a carrier would be nearly worthless as they're not rigged for transporting that many passengers or hosting the landing craft to put them on the beach.
Not that I don't agree with you about everything else - just nitpicking.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The LPDs are not aircraft carriers nor do they resemble the British carriers, such as the Invincible class.
You were probably thinking of the Tarawa class LHAs and Wasp class LHDs, which do outwardly resemble the Invincible class carriers, however they also have a well deck for landing craft which the British ships do not.
The LHAs and LHDs are primarily designed for amphibious landing operations, their primary mission is to deliver a USMC battalion to shore and support the Marines in combat operations.
The British Invincible-class carriers are light aircraft carriers whose primary mission is to operate Sea Harrier fixed wing V/STOL aircraft and helicopters.
While the US ships operate the AV-8B ( the US version of the Harrier ), V-22 Ospreys and helicopters they are not light aircraft carriers.
The Tarawa class ships are almost twice as big ( about 38,900 tons ) as the British carriers (by displacement) and the Wasps ( about 40,500 tons ) have about twice the displacement of Invincible-class ( about 20,700 tons ).
The Nimitz class super carriers are entirely in a class of their own. The newest Nimitz class carriers displace more than 103,000 tons and can operate up to 90 fixed wing non-V/STOL aircraft ( vs. about 20 aircraft including Harriers and helicopters for the British carriers ).
Even if you get the Wasp and an LPD mixed up, my same comment still applies - neither an LPD or an LHD is a CV. Three different ships, three different missions. (Though the missions of the LPD and the LHD are related.)
Which works so long as your opponent similarly limits himself to a small number of low performance aircraft. If you face an opponent who doesn't... You're in deep, deep shit.
Which worked because the Argentinean's were borderline incompetent, and operating at the extreme edge of their range. A very specific set of circumstances and one very, very, dangerous to generalize from.