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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.)
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.
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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
GoC is a Microsoft house and always will be. They are so entrenched they write the RFCs to ensure they will always win
Would that be why the main gc.ca site runs Apache and OpenSSL on Linux, and why Revenue Canada had to shut down online filing for a few days when Heartbleed hit to upgrade systems? Incidentally, they also use Akamai CDN (which runs Linux) for load balancing.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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!
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.