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.)

Comments

Canada ahead of the USA, Wow!

[evolutionary]

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.

Re:BAHAHA

[cbiltcliffe]

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.

Re:Flabbergasted - great news for Canada!

[ShawnX]

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.