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Egyptian Government To Adopt Free Software On Larger Scale
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."
Free software for people who are not free... Yeah. That's fucking hilarious.
How about adopting some free speech, equal rights? Maybe some basic human rights? Or how about just a little decency...
Thats some fine trolling there egypt.
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.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Keep the furnace busy, they are freedom fighters after all.
Tomorrow is another day...
The last thing the Muslim Brotherhood wants is "Freedom".
The one thing that brought the Egyptian government to the free software is that Egypt is facing imminent bankruptcy.
Egyptian pounds have lost 50% of its value since the uprising, and it's poised to lose even more, thanks to the clueless Muslim Brotherhood on running anything effectively.
Right now, as we speak, Egyptians are busy changing their Egyptian pounds into foreign currencies because they know that the Egyptian pounds gonna be devalued even more !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
"stating its commitment to gradually move to open source as a strategic option for future projects"
They aren't changing anything. They're going to use the Microsoft licenses they have already bought.. but on future projects, open source may get a shot, but probably not.
I'm glad these people chose to go protest over some Microsoft licenses amounting to $43m, instead of clearly less important things, like Morsi throwing their momentary democracy in trash.
"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
AccountKiller
The only form of legal assembly was religious groups so they were the only ones that were organised enough to run the place after the old government was kicked out
hey, I'll take what I can get.
Free software for people who are not free... Yeah. That's fucking hilarious.
How about adopting some free speech, equal rights? Maybe some basic human rights? Or how about just a little decency...
Thats some fine trolling there egypt.
who said we are not free? lol , at least we had a social revolution which is still going on too till now,and we had free&transparent elections since the revolution started! and until now,multinational corporations are not brain-washing us and controlling our life like the usa , so i guess judging others like this is just a symbol of jealousy maybe?
Excellent. A double portion of a free beating for you.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
the Egyptian government was faced with a protest from FOSS enthusiasts staging a stand before the cabinet http//www.egyptindependent.com/news/activists-protest-microsoft-deal
Y'know, they really should invent a way to visit links quicker than copying and pasting the text into the URL bar.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Because any money that they would give to develop free (or not) software that would come out of this billion would be
taken out of the money that already flows out to US companies, to buy really useful stuff like guns & ammo tanks, planes and all this kind of really important stuff...
Do you really think that any US base aid is not already claimed by some powerful US based corporation ?
I find the calls for free and open software fascinating. For years the news about deals involving Millions of dollars from Mircosoft and other softwere giants with the Egyptian government were common in Egypt, where 40% of the population live on less than $2/day. But that is no surprise, I guess MS knows its way well around corrupted governments.
Now when the Muslim Brothers respond in their first months of governing to calls of turning to FOSS, they get flamed That's just beyond me.
Just because our democracy brought in power someone you dislike, does not mean it is not a democracy. Most of you know nothing about the Muslim Brothers more than their name -which is enough for some to form an opinion about them- or the biased western media coverage about them. Given, or democracy is not perfect, but we are only in its kindergarten, and may be you should ask yourselves first, how a lot of your tax-money found their way to Mubarak's bank accounts for the last 30 years.
Actually, the only real problem was a replacement for Exchange and Outlook, and the new release of Kolab combined with Kontact seems to cover this pretty well (I wish there was a version of Kontact for OSX, seems to be an abandoned project).
As for which desktop, well, *there* I can see some challenges. 2 years ago I would have said Ubuntu, but they screwed up badly so I think Linux Mint may be worth a shot. The fun bit is that Microsoft has just set a development budget: as long as they stay under 43 Million they make a profit.
And with 43 Million even *I* can get a decent platform out. They've shown it in Münich and (less well known) in the Extremadura region of Spain. As a matter of fact, knowing what I know of that project, that project would be the best place to start, because it goes beyond school and enterprise straight into governance.
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Not sure what happened: MÃf¼nich should be Munich (left out the special character, maybe Slashdot has a problem with UTF8 :) ).
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Egypt has zero money. They have enough currency on hand to buy food for the next 3 months. And that's it. If I were them I'd double down on Microsoft and dare Redmond to try to collect.
Upgrade their existing desktops and infrastructure to a version that will still be getting security updates in a couple of years time?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
"multinational corporations are not brain-washing us and controlling our life like the usa "
No you are being manipulated by a 6th century cult demanding your ever lasting and unquestioning obedience. The protesters and citizens of Egypt got the same screwing as the Iranian protesters did after their 1979 revolution. Evidently the people in the Mideast are experts at street protests but don't have a clue about how to organize and implement any of the changes they were standing out in the street demanding. And all things being equal I will take Exxon, IBM, Apple, or any other multi national company over any group who uses religion to project their power.