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Free Software Supporter and Canadian MP David Graham Talks OSS In Government (linux-magazine.com)
New submitter ShawnX writes: If David Graham sounds familiar, you might know him better as cdlu (short for "confused debian linux user"). For years, cdlu was my colleague at Linux.com and Newsforge and well-known in Debian circles as well. Since then, he has been a presence in the back rooms of the Liberal Party until, in the federal election in October 2015, he was elected for the first time. He now describes himself (no doubt correctly) as "the only Member of Parliament to be in the Debian key ring."
(And here's video of Graham discussing greater use of Open Source in government, from the perspective of someone with a foot in each of those worlds.)
GoC is a Microsoft house and always will be. They are so entrenched they write the RFCs to ensure they will always win
Eh???
I've seen cdlu's comments for years and always respected his posts and insights. While I knew his name, I never connected the two.
Very nice to see that he's in a position to influence things in the Canadian government. Too bad there isn't a Ministry of Information Technology; it sound like Mr. Graham would be a great fit for the job.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I can't believe I just heard a politician ask, in a government operations committee, about transitioning away from 32-bit signed integers. Just... wow.
If this happens it will be great news for Canadians. The liberal party appears to be taking privacy issues more seriously than the previous government. With Windows 10 sending potentially private confidential data plus recent "trojan" reported this is becoming a big deal. Wonder how MS is going to spin this one.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
I just retired from the City of Calgary, and damn, I thought we were having trouble keeping up. We, too, imagined that IE was your only tolerable browser -- up to a few years ago when they threw up their hands and started backing Chrome installs because people were installing it anyway in their home directories. Now it's taking over everything except a few apps that demand IE...and apps that do that are no longer considered for new purchases.
Calgary went all-Linux about 2004, making some waves in the trade journals at the time: we were getting (way) better performance with HP intel chips and RedHat than we had been with Solaris machines, for a fifth the cost(!) All proprietary Unixes were gone within a few years. And mainframes, I thought we were never going to ditch the mainframe, the whole IT department was built around it and they clung bitterly to that thing well into the 21st century...but it, too, has been gone for nearly 10 years now.
The notion that the Feds still have all that stuff so long after a slow-changing conservative municipal government ditched it is sobering, almost shocking.
They're really leaving a lot of money on the table!
FOSS is just one ingredient in the changes needed, and this MP needs to pick it as his signature topic and go after some of that "waste" that politicians are always promising to pay for new programs with - we've actually found some!
Canada wins because no guns.
Too bad they didn't kill that nutjob sooner
There is no problem with 32bit signed integers, there is a problem with programmers who provide computations that are useful at greater resolution than 32bits, but use code that assumes properties of 32bit signed integers. ... TL;DR: If you are asking about transitioning away from a prior standard, then you are probably not qualified to make decisions based on the best answer to said question.
If you worry about this to begin with, I imagine you are at least a fairly bright guy, but I also happen to think you're at least a bit off on this one.
First, because the promise of computing is fundamentally one of making things easier for people, including programmers. If things are easier and the mechanisms to make them easier are designed well, it becomes harder to mess things up and we become more efficient in the vast majority of our dealings. This premise isn't only one that applies to end-users, but also to programmers who are using the tools created by other programmers to create programs. There is a reason why so many programmers don't do serious memory management in their coding today, and it's because they don't have to--not because they couldn't learn it. Javascript, of all things, is actually a popular language. Javascript! It is true that a lot of programmers are not necessarily going to realize when they have a code segment that unnecessarily relies on properties of 32-bit signed integers. But the answer to that is not just to say "Programmers should realize this." The answer is making it really *easy* for a programmer to realize it, and really easy for a programmer to do the same thing without relying on the properties of 32-bit signed integers, and eventually to make it be something that requires turning off a warning or the like.
And second, because IRL people frequently have to make decisions about things they are not professionally qualified to make decisions about, and that is why they ask experts questions. They are qualified by virtue of the fact that they want something done, and they need to decide who they trust to explain the issues to them and to answer their questions. Just like you are qualified to decide if you want a contractor to open up a dividing wall in your house. You may get help from a structural engineer to make the decision, but it's your house.
Government data belongs to the taxpayers (us), and therefore must be stored in open (fully documented) file formats to prevent it getting lost or stuck behind paywalls.
For governments of countries who generate no import revenue from software licensing, Free Open Source Software makes sense. In fact they can just turn around and invest that licence fee in Free Open Source Software to better tailor it to their needs and they are still enormously better off, having invested in the local development of computer skills and ensured any capital expenditure in fact does generate tax revenues. Considering the level of tax evasions amounting to trillions globally, spending money on tax evading licence schemes is very questionable and should be considered a sure sign of corruption.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Ian Murdock killed himself. Stop trying to find scapegoats.