Egyptian Government To Adopt Free Software On Larger Scale

Posted by Unknown on Monday December 31, 2012 @03:02PM from the digital-arab-spring dept.

ezabi writes "After announcing a 43 million USD license agreement with Microsoft, the Egyptian government was faced with a protest from FOSS enthusiasts staging a protest before the cabinet. Later, representatives from the community had a meeting with the minister of communications and information technology. Such a meeting led to the ministry issuing a press release (in Arabic) stating its commitment to gradually move to open source (Google Translate to English) as a strategic option for future projects. It's worth mentioning that all governmental websites used in the elections and constitution referendum were all based on open source solutions."

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And open interfaces? by MichaelSmith · 2012-12-31 15:20 · Score: 4, Interesting

Hard to imagine that the Egyptian Government will be happy in the long term with software which gives the user full control over encryption and messaging. They will want a nice closed source solution with DRM right there in the kernel, firmly attached to the hardware.

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Charlie Brooker on Windows ... by dgharmon · 2012-12-31 17:31 · Score: 4, Interesting

"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it".

"using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981" Charlie Brooker

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