As a government employee in Brazil, I totally support this proposed bill which, in short:
- States that all government agencies and companies must only purchase, from the date of effectiveness on, open source software;
- Describes (fairly well) what open source is;
- Demands source code to be shipped with the packages;
- Mandates all derivative software occasionally created to be open source too;
- Grants permission to use non open source software in case there are no open source products that fullfill the requirements in each case.
Just to clarify, there is no mention at all regarding purchases made by private companies.
Some have stated their points of view here about this being a measure that would take their jobs. Well, it is the role of the public administrator to spend taxpayer money in the wisest possible way, and if you have two alternatives that do the same job, not choosing the cheapest would be immoral, to say the least. If one looses his/her job because of evolutionary changes in the industry, then one should apply for social service help in case of hardship, instead of lobbying against open source.
Think of an array of public schools in a small-budget town, where the City Administration has some 40 plus 386's without much future use perspective. Imagine that you want to integrate IT fundamentals into the educational process. Either you scrap those, buy PIII's to run Win2000 and proprietary apps or you buy one Linux distro, gets someone to write the apps you need and spend the money you saved in something else.
You probably wouldn't have to hire extra people to do this. The better half of software use by government offices is written in-house (I think the same holds true for the U.S. too) and most programmers are experienced with open source software and would be glad to be allowed to write open source code in their work hours!
It is about time this safety net (government purchases) is taken away from commercial companies.
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Wasn't the Altair 8080-based?
Sadly enough, you're not the only one who thinks that way.
It *did* pop up in the middle of the page!
Think of that: you carry a GPS along, a road map, and you will never get lost again!
I got the same response, so I don't think anyone is actually reading this kind of email anyway...
As a government employee in Brazil, I totally support this proposed bill which, in short:
- States that all government agencies and companies must only purchase, from the date of effectiveness on, open source software;
- Describes (fairly well) what open source is;
- Demands source code to be shipped with the packages;
- Mandates all derivative software occasionally created to be open source too;
- Grants permission to use non open source software in case there are no open source products that fullfill the requirements in each case.
Just to clarify, there is no mention at all regarding purchases made by private companies.
Some have stated their points of view here about this being a measure that would take their jobs. Well, it is the role of the public administrator to spend taxpayer money in the wisest possible way, and if you have two alternatives that do the same job, not choosing the cheapest would be immoral, to say the least. If one looses his/her job because of evolutionary changes in the industry, then one should apply for social service help in case of hardship, instead of lobbying against open source.
Think of an array of public schools in a small-budget town, where the City Administration has some 40 plus 386's without much future use perspective. Imagine that you want to integrate IT fundamentals into the educational process. Either you scrap those, buy PIII's to run Win2000 and proprietary apps or you buy one Linux distro, gets someone to write the apps you need and spend the money you saved in something else.
You probably wouldn't have to hire extra people to do this. The better half of software use by government offices is written in-house (I think the same holds true for the U.S. too) and most programmers are experienced with open source software and would be glad to be allowed to write open source code in their work hours!
It is about time this safety net (government purchases) is taken away from commercial companies.