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Croatian Party Advocates Government Adoption of Open Source
An anonymous reader writes: Earlier this year, Croatian political party Sustainable Development of Croatia (ORaH) published a new policy that encourages the government to pursue open source solutions, addresses the dangers of vendor lock-in, and insists on open document standards. Best of all, they did it the open source way. In this article on Opensource.com, Croatian startup founder Josip Almasi highlights some of the policy's implications, as well as why it could matter in the upcoming election.
Flight to quality. Common sense.
You're one of those people who'd watch Jesus walk over water and go "Some messiah he is, can't even swim".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm all for free software, but how does the party plan to respond to Libreland? Another libre movement?
For that computer.
But hell, for open source software, and for the programs that most people use - I gotta tell ya. Libre is actually better than MS office.
I have several computers, all running Libre office. Macs, PC's, and Linux. No lock in.
And it is compatible no matter the platform. I can take a file between the Mac and the PC and the Linux machine, it it's the same. Microsoft Office can't even go between Windows and OS X without glitches. And no Linux at all. Pah - it's the outlier now. The biggest thing MS Office has going for it is it's feature bloat.
Open source as being cheaper? Hell I use a lot of that stuff because its better.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
With the huge negative impact imports have on an economy, it makes simple economic sense to avoid them where ever possible and to actively strive to promote local industry. Using free open source software makes sense. Creating government policy to make use of government university to administer, host and contribute to free open source software also makes sense. Ensuring that all business and people have equal access to government means ensuring no single corporation can dominate, control of suspend that access.
This especially in light of Windows 10 where M$ has made a huge grab for power over countries computer infrastructure, a ludicrously over the top grab for power, although it seems like they really do not realise how far they have stepped over the line. Imagine Windows 10 in your governments administrative offices, imagine windows 10 in your hospitals, imagine windows 10 in your children's school, always watching, always collecting data, logging keystrokes, recording conversations, accessing files. It almost seems like a subconscious act of corporate suicide.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Unencumbered open source software is the key building block of a sustainable government.
The party was formed in 2013. Its leader is a former Minister of Environmental Protection and Nature and Social Democratic Party MP Mirela Holy. She won the seat in the Sabor as a member of Social Democratic Party from which she left after some disagreements over party leadership. On 23 July 2015 it was announced that an independent MP Mladen Novak is joining ORaH. He is a former Croatian Labourists --- Labour Party member who left the party after it started negotiating to join Kukuriku coalition.
Sustainable Development of Croatia
Between January 1990, when political parties were legalized in Croatia, and March 2015, 264 political parties were registered, out of which 118 have since been struck from the register.
Social Democrats 61 seats. [Center-left]
Croatian Democratic Union 44 seats. [Center-right]
Croatian Labourists - Labour 6 seats.
List of political parties in Croatia
After all, business is business
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
No. Of course they're not. GNU will be completely forgotten as soon as Stallman dies, won't it?
Does not compute!
Save what? Lunch money?
Everybody has a Phone. If you don't have a Phone, you don't even exist. Croats must have Phones.
The main point of the article is not about using open source, it is about HOW they created such a policy.
From the article:
First, it was published on the party's website so that everyone could read and comment on it by email. It's common practice for the party: publish, discuss, and acknowledge comments as accepted, rejected, or just as comments. In one year ORaH published more than 30 policies that way.
I'd say the biggest improvement over MS Office is the LACK of the ribbon.
It's fundamentally a bad interface, a picture is always a nouns, it always is a picture of SOMETHING. So a ribbon of pictures is really a ribbon of nouns.
The menu it replaces is mostly verbs, and sometimes verb+noun. It's an *action*, e.g. "Bookmark this page", "Bookmark all pages", View Bookmarks.. when they draw these on a ribbon they have to make tiny little pictures that try to substitute for language. Hieroglyphics.
It's badly thought out and since we communicate by speech, its difficult to support across the phone, and to teach and so on.
I use Open Office myself, but I find it infinitely preferable to MS Office.
Technically, very few people could do anything that we'd call swimming back then. The strokes you see in a swimming pool today are relatively modern inventions.
Those filthy commies, stealing the bread from the mouths of our American corporations! Nuke them immediately!
Croatia's the one next to France, right?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And you're the guy who explains that horses violate health codes when the "a horse walks into a bar" joke is being told.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's very interesting to see the green parties of Europe take up the cause of free software and freedom-of-information/IP-reform positions that are usually advocated by pirate parties. These green parties were instrumental in helping defeat ACTA in the European parliament, and it is nice to see these platforms finding more support.