I'm suprised there hasn't been this sort of "push" before. Why should money be wasted on Microsoft licenses when it could be spend on something more useful? Maybe even education.
Because the people making the decisions are not asking the question. They just don't appear to think that way.
What RM monopoly? I never heard of them having much success after the old Nimbus sorta-PCs.
Because if they get themselves approved by the LEA as a supplier it's not necessary for schools to go through the usual procedure for spending large amounts of money.
But, they won't be interested in re-training / hiring staff that can work the server or in "yet another" network upgrade. They won't be interested in replacing their systems with an "unknown". Most schools are currently being offered and considering, as well as actually buying, XP upgrades for their RM networks (we're talking in the region of £40-50,000 for a small, suburban infant school, here) Thin-clients alone would save costs, certainly. Thin-clients on a Linux-based server is even better.
The thing is that XP (or for that matter SuperStar) is considered an "upgrade" rather than a "leap into the unknown".
These people aren't gonna have a clue what we're on about and certainly won't part with the time or the money required to have someone come in, format ~100 computers back to basics, install a network server and have someone on hand to maintain it all.
But at the same time they are likely to ask what "the problem" is when some badly written "educational program" requires a time consuming update to be run on every single workstation. Jest because the idiot who wrote the software dosn't know what a network is.
It's a nice idea. I want them to try to convince people. Unfortunately, it's gonna be a very rough ride for them while RM still has a monopoly and while the government and local education authorities does little to try to educate them.
IME these are the people who actually need educating most immediatly.
It is a total myth that Linux desktops are difficult to use. KDE and GNOME are just as easy to use as Windows,
Probably more accurate to describe as "no harder". Since the "ease of use" of Windows is often overstated.
Now, where Linux gets tough, is when you have to install it, configure it, get everything set up and running "just so".
You need to do this for any operating system.
Then it's a pain and way beyond the scope of your average end user.
The idea of end user administration is something of a "Microsoftism". It also tends to make administration of Microsoft systems over complex in environments where the end user and system admin are different people. Which is the case in most corporate and educational systems.
Fortunately, in such environments as a school, or an office, this isn't the job of the end user, it's the job of the sysadmins. They're in charge of keeping them all running smoothly and doing "all that complicated techy stuff" so the users don't have to concern themselves with it, they just get the job done.
Moreover you explicitally don't want end users fiddling with anything with potential to break things. A serious enough problem with office workers, let alone school childen who can find vandalism a source of ammusement. The idea of end user serviced and maintained machines is rarely even considered outside of computers. Why does anyone think that it makes sense with some of the most complex machines yet built?
HOWEVER, speech rights can be limited -- to a degree -- by copyright, as it's a Constitutional power that Congress can exercise if it chooses.
That would only be the case if the ability of the US Congress to pass copyright laws was derived from a later ammendment. The first ammendment contains an absolute prohibition on the US Congress passing laws which impinge of freedome of speach.
It's about the content dammit! People don't buy DVDs for previews, for fancy menus or the damn FBI warning. Most people want the movie, not the 2 hours of celebrity mutual masturbation that is the typical "bonus" disk.
They might want deleted scenes, maybe even a movie longer than the typical 90-100 minutes.
They keep on trying but when will they realize that as long as a human being can see or hear it that it can be recoded in a more friendly format and put online where others will be able to obtain it so that they don't have to go through the same hassle at getting the content in a user-friendly format.
Will they realise before or after they attempt to get the laws of physics ammended though:)
It's even crazier than we think. SCO isn't claiming that it (or AT&T, Novell, etc.) necessarilly wrote the code that IBM allegedly put into Linux. Rather, SCO says that it has exclusive rights to any code that IBM distributed with AIX, even if the code is entirely IBM's own word! Essentially, all code in any form of Unix belongs to SCO.
In other words they are claiming "viral licencing". Kind of strange that Microsoft isn't attacking them, given that they claim to be so against this.
So, basically if I'm understanding this right, and correct me if I'm wrong, the Initiative for Software Choice is lobbying to basically remove South Australia's choice to use Open Source Software from consideration and more or less force them into using closed source software. Kind of ironic.
Hardly unique though. They'd fit in well with supposedly anti-sexism lobby groups which are actually sexist, racist lobbying groups which claim to be racist. Not forgetting lobby groups which represent an atypical position as being widely held.
Groups with names that don't support their actual agenda like this should really be openly chastised by major media outlets for being hypocritical to the point of just being ridiculous,
When you have much of the mainstream media in the control of a few big corporates this is unlikely.
Look, this nut was doing 100+ in a residential neighborhood. He got what he deserved.
No he didn't, he got off with the special charge of "vehicular homicide", which most likely carries a lesser sentence than "murder". Apparently the people he killed had the misfortune not to be cops.
~600 yrs ago - gunpowder/artillery: with gunpowder came the rise of the modern state. Things started to change rapidly after this. Body armor was no longer effective in stopping gunpowder, so we could threaten coercive violence on a larger scale.
Body armor had already been rendered ineffective before the invention of firearms. Most notably the Battle of Agincore. Even modern body armour wouldn't be much good against Roman artillary.
Right now, a company in Germany, let's call it geschellschaft.de, would not burden the root nameservers with looking up all hosts for this domain. Instead, once a nameserver has looked up.de, it caches and knows for future reference that everything under.de should be asked for on one of the servers dedicated to serve.de. A query for geschellschaft.de won't have to hit the root name servers at all if someone earlier queried for bier.de.
There is an urban legand that the.de system was so logical that the German post office could deliver "snail mail" with just an email addres on the envelope.
Why are there too many? Why should there even be a limit on the number of TLD's? If you really think about it, what significance does a TLD really have?
Why bother with country and area codes in telephone numbers? Why bother with having postal addresses? The point is that a well designed hirarchical system is that it is relativly easy for humans to understand.
Speakers in the United States of America typically don't use the term "state" to refer to a sovereign state because "state" most often refers to non-sovereign political subdivisions roughly equivalent to Canadian provinces, Australian states, or possibly Japanese prefectures.
Thing is that US states do have limited sovereignty according of the Federal constitution. Things are actually a little more complex than that. Not least because one US "state" is actually an illegally occupied country.
These deals always strike me as lame. I can understand why poorer countries do this but I count the companies that cut the deals among the cheesier entities online.. right after spammers and porn sites.
Also the original poster calls this a "step in the right direction". IMHO this is yet another step in the wrong direction. If people in California were to start aquiring Laotian telephone numbers and postal addresses no-one would think this was sensible. Most likely they'd think that any business doing this was highly dodgy. If the city of Los Angeles wants it's own domain what's wrong with la.ca.us or even the-angels.ca.us ?
Take the nice and sturdy security of a Unix platform, modify it heavily to your own custom needs, and KEEP THE SOURCE CLOSED and don't allow anyone not from the government (and of course the creators of the code) to access it.
In order for this you would have to first extensivly screen everyone involved in the project as well as anyone they might have contact with. Then you have keep them under a close watch for the rest of their lives.
Just have a team of testers from the company that wrote the code working on finding vulnerabilities.
If they "black box" test the system hope they don't miss anything. If they need to "white box" then they have just signed up for life membership of this hypothetical black software agency.
Most of you are missing the big picture. Most of you are too caught up in your open source "movement" and idealism of free software that you're so blinded by your love of open source and hatred for MS and Gates
As if the proprietary software movement, of which Mr Gates is "poster boy", dosn't qualify as as "blinded".
(which you always seem to blame Blue Screens on the OS and not the drivers for some reason)
Because the OS is broken because it takes such a drastic action in response to the actions of a third party driver.
Other government agencies and/or anti-government/terrorist organizations could easily search the code for exploits and vulnerabilities that would allow them to attack government computers. Depending on how the gov designs their networks and implements the opensource software, it could lead to some serious troubles.
Having the source isn't necessary to exploit vulnerabilities in a program. As all the exploits of Microsoft's programs demonstrate. Even if this was an issue how can you be sure that the code is safe from terrorists/other governments, just because only people at the software company can see it. Effectivly this is just an argument of "security by obscurity". Whereas if you want good security you have as few "secrets" as possible and the entire system subject to examination.
For instance, there are no good quality open source tools for GIS or CAD requirements. Free or open source is good, but does not always fit the requirements of what is needed in a particular environment.
How exactly will proprietary software magically happen to fit the requirements? The only way you get software to fit the requirements is to have it written. There is a lot less "baggage" involved with open source than proprietary software when it comes to writing software. Especially if you want to be able to use any pre-existing code or to have the ability to maintain or modify the result at some later date.
I demand that they do more paperwork and generate lots more garbage justifying every ticky tack purchase or license. These reports must document carefully the reasons why each decision was made in favor of one choice over another.
This is probably what the rules actually say they should be doing now! Since the whole point of purchasing rules is to prevent "vendor lockin". Proprietary software is more or less mutually exclusive with typical purchasing rules in the first place. Thus there should be a very good jusification of why your money is being spent in violation of the rules designed to prevent it being squandered. Alternativly they can use software which dosn't require spending money on the purchase and administration of EULA's, CAL's, etc. in the first place.
Free software is almost always better than it's closed source counterparts. Free software, in part, helps to avoid vendor lock in, a very real goal of state purchasing laws. Legislators have already decided they don't like getting raped by vendors. Vendor lock in always results in a lack of legitimate competition and inferior goods in the end.
At least part of the problem is that these laws and purchasing regulations tend not to be applied to software. If they were proprietary software would never have even got a "foot in the door".
The closed source software companies, which have only existed in their current form since the early 1980s, has a lot of nerve to try to impose these conditions on the public and call it IP rights.
Indeed the idea of software software being a manufacturing industry is also tied up with this. Thing is that for most real world software systems the idea of an "off the shelf" package, let alone system is an utter nonsense. At best extensive customisation is likely to be needed to fit the actual requirments.
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I'm suprised there hasn't been this sort of "push" before. Why should money be wasted on Microsoft licenses when it could be spend on something more useful? Maybe even education.
Because the people making the decisions are not asking the question. They just don't appear to think that way.
Management are always a problem, and it's the usual scenario: if it's Free, it has to be crap.
It isn't that simple, otherwise no-one would touch ProDesktop (which is an awful piece of software) with a bargepole.
What RM monopoly? I never heard of them having much success after the old Nimbus sorta-PCs.
Because if they get themselves approved by the LEA as a supplier it's not necessary for schools to go through the usual procedure for spending large amounts of money.
But, they won't be interested in re-training / hiring staff that can work the server or in "yet another" network upgrade. They won't be interested in replacing their systems with an "unknown".
Most schools are currently being offered and considering, as well as actually buying, XP upgrades for their RM networks (we're talking in the region of £40-50,000 for a small, suburban infant school, here) Thin-clients alone would save costs, certainly. Thin-clients on a Linux-based server is even better.
The thing is that XP (or for that matter SuperStar) is considered an "upgrade" rather than a "leap into the unknown".
These people aren't gonna have a clue what we're on about and certainly won't part with the time or the money required to have someone come in, format ~100 computers back to basics, install a network server and have someone on hand to maintain it all.
But at the same time they are likely to ask what "the problem" is when some badly written "educational program" requires a time consuming update to be run on every single workstation. Jest because the idiot who wrote the software dosn't know what a network is.
It's a nice idea. I want them to try to convince people. Unfortunately, it's gonna be a very rough ride for them while RM still has a monopoly and while the government and local education authorities does little to try to educate them.
IME these are the people who actually need educating most immediatly.
It is a total myth that Linux desktops are difficult to use. KDE and GNOME are just as easy to use as Windows,
Probably more accurate to describe as "no harder". Since the "ease of use" of Windows is often overstated.
Now, where Linux gets tough, is when you have to install it, configure it, get everything set up and running "just so".
You need to do this for any operating system.
Then it's a pain and way beyond the scope of your average end user.
The idea of end user administration is something of a "Microsoftism". It also tends to make administration of Microsoft systems over complex in environments where the end user and system admin are different people. Which is the case in most corporate and educational systems.
Fortunately, in such environments as a school, or an office, this isn't the job of the end user, it's the job of the sysadmins. They're in charge of keeping them all running smoothly and doing "all that complicated techy stuff" so the users don't have to concern themselves with it, they just get the job done.
Moreover you explicitally don't want end users fiddling with anything with potential to break things. A serious enough problem with office workers, let alone school childen who can find vandalism a source of ammusement.
The idea of end user serviced and maintained machines is rarely even considered outside of computers. Why does anyone think that it makes sense with some of the most complex machines yet built?
HOWEVER, speech rights can be limited -- to a degree -- by copyright, as it's a Constitutional power that Congress can exercise if it chooses.
That would only be the case if the ability of the US Congress to pass copyright laws was derived from a later ammendment. The first ammendment contains an absolute prohibition on the US Congress passing laws which impinge of freedome of speach.
Believe it or not, but the grandparent claimed that the First Amendment guaranteed the right to "copy materials".
Since it is an ammendment it can supercede any pre-existing part of the document it is ammending. Unless it is superceded by a later ammendment.
It's about the content dammit! People don't buy DVDs for previews, for fancy menus or the damn FBI warning. Most people want the movie, not the 2 hours of celebrity mutual masturbation that is the typical "bonus" disk.
They might want deleted scenes, maybe even a movie longer than the typical 90-100 minutes.
They keep on trying but when will they realize that as long as a human being can see or hear it that it can be recoded in a more friendly format and put online where others will be able to obtain it so that they don't have to go through the same hassle at getting the content in a user-friendly format.
:)
Will they realise before or after they attempt to get the laws of physics ammended though
It's even crazier than we think. SCO isn't claiming that it (or AT&T, Novell, etc.) necessarilly wrote the code that IBM allegedly put into Linux. Rather, SCO says that it has exclusive rights to any code that IBM distributed with AIX, even if the code is entirely IBM's own word! Essentially, all code in any form of Unix belongs to SCO.
In other words they are claiming "viral licencing". Kind of strange that Microsoft isn't attacking them, given that they claim to be so against this.
So, basically if I'm understanding this right, and correct me if I'm wrong, the Initiative for Software Choice is lobbying to basically remove South Australia's choice to use Open Source Software from consideration and more or less force them into using closed source software. Kind of ironic.
Hardly unique though. They'd fit in well with supposedly anti-sexism lobby groups which are actually sexist, racist lobbying groups which claim to be racist. Not forgetting lobby groups which represent an atypical position as being widely held.
Groups with names that don't support their actual agenda like this should really be openly chastised by major media outlets for being hypocritical to the point of just being ridiculous,
When you have much of the mainstream media in the control of a few big corporates this is unlikely.
Look, this nut was doing 100+ in a residential neighborhood. He got what he deserved.
No he didn't, he got off with the special charge of "vehicular homicide", which most likely carries a lesser sentence than "murder". Apparently the people he killed had the misfortune not to be cops.
~600 yrs ago - gunpowder/artillery: with gunpowder came the rise of the modern state. Things started to change rapidly after this. Body armor was no longer effective in stopping gunpowder, so we could threaten coercive violence on a larger scale.
Body armor had already been rendered ineffective before the invention of firearms. Most notably the Battle of Agincore. Even modern body armour wouldn't be much good against Roman artillary.
Right now, a company in Germany, let's call it geschellschaft.de, would not burden the root nameservers with looking up all hosts for this domain. Instead, once a nameserver has looked up .de, it caches and knows for future reference that everything under .de should be asked for on one of the servers dedicated to serve .de. A query for geschellschaft.de won't have to hit the root name servers at all if someone earlier queried for bier.de.
.de system was so logical that the German post office could deliver "snail mail" with just an email addres on the envelope.
There is an urban legand that the
Why are there too many? Why should there even be a limit on the number of TLD's? If you really think about it, what significance does a TLD really have?
Why bother with country and area codes in telephone numbers? Why bother with having postal addresses?
The point is that a well designed hirarchical system is that it is relativly easy for humans to understand.
Speakers in the United States of America typically don't use the term "state" to refer to a sovereign state because "state" most often refers to non-sovereign political subdivisions roughly equivalent to Canadian provinces, Australian states, or possibly Japanese prefectures.
Thing is that US states do have limited sovereignty according of the Federal constitution. Things are actually a little more complex than that. Not least because one US "state" is actually an illegally occupied country.
These deals always strike me as lame. I can understand why poorer countries do this but I count the companies that cut the deals among the cheesier entities online.. right after spammers and porn sites.
Also the original poster calls this a "step in the right direction". IMHO this is yet another step in the wrong direction.
If people in California were to start aquiring Laotian telephone numbers and postal addresses no-one would think this was sensible. Most likely they'd think that any business doing this was highly dodgy. If the city of Los Angeles wants it's own domain what's wrong with la.ca.us or even the-angels.ca.us ?
I'm sorry, but what features does AbiWord have that frickin WORDPAD doesn't!???
Not requiring you to mess around with one of Microsoft's "operating systems" in order to be able to use it.
Commercial software has marketing, sales teams, and slews of paid people backing it up.
:)
On the other hand you could call them "people who do nothing to add to the software's functionality, but who still need paying"
Open source software has none of this (outside of your local OSS zealot).
Of course advocates of proprietary software are never "zealots"...
Take the nice and sturdy security of a Unix platform, modify it heavily to your own custom needs, and KEEP THE SOURCE CLOSED and don't allow anyone not from the government (and of course the creators of the code) to access it.
In order for this you would have to first extensivly screen everyone involved in the project as well as anyone they might have contact with. Then you have keep them under a close watch for the rest of their lives.
Just have a team of testers from the company that wrote the code working on finding vulnerabilities.
If they "black box" test the system hope they don't miss anything. If they need to "white box" then they have just signed up for life membership of this hypothetical black software agency.
Most of you are missing the big picture. Most of you are too caught up in your open source "movement" and idealism of free software that you're so blinded by your love of open source and hatred for MS and Gates
As if the proprietary software movement, of which Mr Gates is "poster boy", dosn't qualify as as "blinded".
(which you always seem to blame Blue Screens on the OS and not the drivers for some reason)
Because the OS is broken because it takes such a drastic action in response to the actions of a third party driver.
Other government agencies and/or anti-government/terrorist organizations could easily search the code for exploits and vulnerabilities that would allow them to attack government computers. Depending on how the gov designs their networks and implements the opensource software, it could lead to some serious troubles.
Having the source isn't necessary to exploit vulnerabilities in a program. As all the exploits of Microsoft's programs demonstrate. Even if this was an issue how can you be sure that the code is safe from terrorists/other governments, just because only people at the software company can see it.
Effectivly this is just an argument of "security by obscurity". Whereas if you want good security you have as few "secrets" as possible and the entire system subject to examination.
For instance, there are no good quality open source tools for GIS or CAD requirements. Free or open source is good, but does not always fit the requirements of what is needed in a particular environment.
How exactly will proprietary software magically happen to fit the requirements?
The only way you get software to fit the requirements is to have it written. There is a lot less "baggage" involved with open source than proprietary software when it comes to writing software. Especially if you want to be able to use any pre-existing code or to have the ability to maintain or modify the result at some later date.
I demand that they do more paperwork and generate lots more garbage justifying every ticky tack purchase or license. These reports must document carefully the reasons why each decision was made in favor of one choice over another.
This is probably what the rules actually say they should be doing now! Since the whole point of purchasing rules is to prevent "vendor lockin". Proprietary software is more or less mutually exclusive with typical purchasing rules in the first place. Thus there should be a very good jusification of why your money is being spent in violation of the rules designed to prevent it being squandered.
Alternativly they can use software which dosn't require spending money on the purchase and administration of EULA's, CAL's, etc. in the first place.
Free software is almost always better than it's closed source counterparts. Free software, in part, helps to avoid vendor lock in, a very real goal of state purchasing laws. Legislators have already decided they don't like getting raped by vendors. Vendor lock in always results in a lack of legitimate competition and inferior goods in the end.
At least part of the problem is that these laws and purchasing regulations tend not to be applied to software. If they were proprietary software would never have even got a "foot in the door".
The closed source software companies, which have only existed in their current form since the early 1980s, has a lot of nerve to try to impose these conditions on the public and call it IP rights.
Indeed the idea of software software being a manufacturing industry is also tied up with this.
Thing is that for most real world software systems the idea of an "off the shelf" package, let alone system is an utter nonsense. At best extensive customisation is likely to be needed to fit the actual requirments.
why any goverment on its right mind would want to deal with a convicted monopolist abuser?
Let alone one in a foreign country who is outside of their control.