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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.)
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!
having known cdlu (David) personally from our Ottawa Linux Symposium days we keep in touch on IRC (yes, maybe the first EVER elected MP to use IRC still). It is very important we have an advocate for FLOSS in government to guide others to understand technology. He can dissimulate technical details to other politicians in layman's terms. Better informed politicians are at what laws they pass the better we'll be.
Everyone wants a Tux in their life.