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World Map Shows Countries Requiring Open Source Software (networkworld.com)
"Europe and South America are the biggest hotspots for open-source use in government," reports Network World, while Bulgaria requires all software written for the government to be FOSS. Slashdot reader alphadogg quotes their report: It's become increasingly common over the past decade or so to see laws being passed to either mandate the use of open-source software or, at the very least, encourage people in government who make procurement decisions to do so. Here's a map of the status of open-source laws around the world.
It makes sense but it doesn't make money. So don't expect to see mandated or even encouraged FOSS here in the United States on any kind of meaningful level.
Why sell support or service when you can sell that AND the software.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Hmmmm. Is requiring open source freedom?
Red Hat has grown almost 100% over the last five years and has billions in revenue. The counter-argument would be Microsoft, but you may have noticed Microsoft has been open-sourcing stuff too, and making billions.
At the same time, open source saved my last employer, a government agency, a ton of money. In many cases, it just works better all around to share. The company selling the software and services doesn't have the cost of developing everything from scratch, and customers aren't dependent on a single vendor.
Those countries don't need free software anymore as they already adopted it an a wide base.
It's all those other poor countries that still rely on proprietary crap that really need more free software!
Places like Slashdot and Reddit are basically known suckers for anything that says open source. There is no government where they force all government workers to use open source software. The fact is, lots of countries need lots of proprietary software and have for decades and will continue for decades.Good luck nationalizing your software and writing a competing product to AutoCAD. It's just you know.. engineering software right. Nothing government would need. It's a nice idea, but most software is not grossly overpriced for the amount of man hours that it will process, not the time it saves, but rather the YEARS of operation that software gives you at the rate of many hours per day with minimal downtime. For a immature industry it does well, but for an immature industry pushing for end game solutions like open source just doesn't make as much sense as many of you pretend it does. First off, lets loo at the real open source world, not the ideal one in your utopian shared code dreams. Without the standard for hire management hierarchy who controls an opensource project in the long run? If this is non profit are we to assume many of it's members make 250k or less? Ok, well, how hard is it to bride a loosely knit organization of people getting average pay, often volunteering their time while working 40 hours a week. Where is the physical security? Where is the notion that this project has enough value to resist the corruption that billion dollar markets can put on it? I' just supposed to take all that on faith and then embrace a project that almost always has less features and isn't compatible with the industry standard. Ok, so how many hours of conversion or lost jobs do I factor in for using open source office software? How much loss do I factor in for having to force people to learn two entirely different platforms and different apps on those platforms?What happens when a new architecture comes out and my slow moving open source community can't rapidly adapt OR get forced out by ever specializing hardware? Did you guys not see that coming/ How are you doing to maintain Linux on specialized hardware when it's splintered so much? .NET makes the portability of Linux look stupid, like a person with a pile of books vs one using a nice organized library with a system made to organize books. Open source is going to fall behind as more and more new hardware comes out, specialized hardware made for exact purposes. You can eventually get all that working, but it's going to take years behind what the people who own the hardware will be able to do AND at some point they will purposely push you out as competition.
Linux and open source have a rough future ahead of them, not the bright world domination that everyone thinks. Platforms change and computing is still very immature. It's only been around 20-30 years in any meaningful mass market way. Opensource has a long history of exploiting hardware to get the most out of it, but it does so 5 years after the hardware comes out usually, not when it the hardware is new and has market appeal.
For mission critical security devices opensource makes sense, but you can't have the best software and have it be open source because you don't live in a social utopia where people just do what's best for humanity without a compelling reward. You can't maintain the pace of companies like Microsoft just via open source. You need alliances with the hardware companies and there isn't much guarantee that random opensource projects with minimal leadership and little to no funding will get that.
None of this makes any sense anyway. All that we should care about is that the best apps have reasonably high availability to most of the people who could use them. This should be like any market where the best app wins and the victory gets money. If you don't want the best apps, then go open source, but when it comes to complex apps that require millions of lines of code and constant upkeep, open source has a very hard time keeping up.
Linux is not catching up to windows when all is sa
If France is green, I suspect french guyana should be green too.
A new policy (a pilot program) in the US is that federal agencies must (with some important exceptions) release at least 20% of any in-house code they develop as open source.
On hearing this, my brother quickly whipped up a script to print every fifth letter in a text file. :)
Another site leaving you guessing what to allow in No Script to see the content. I just closed it instead.
My guess is that he put the necessary CR/LFs in his text, but that this giiky Slashdot didn't show them.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Probably, but that's what the preview button is for: to find out when Slashdot screws up your comment so you can fix it before submitting.
Plus why let logic like that get in the way of a joke :)