If you are truly serious about studying the Bible as a living book, and not as a museum piece, then pick up a New King James or NIV version. These are easily readable and accurately reflect centuries of scholarship.
Thanks for the dogma, but I think this release is meant more for the fact that the GB is a museam piece. It is interesting not beacuse it's a bible - they're easy to come by - but because it was one of the first books made with movable type. It could be The Truth by Terry Pratchett for all anyone cares about the content.
If various governments survive the embarrassment of Sexual Infidelity, Corruption, Law Breaking and various other political plagues...
Do you really think you can embarrass them by their choice of Operating System?
As I've said before the parliament is unfortunatly not a public forum anyway. Even if excessive expenditure was revealed, it wouldn't work, because people don't know about other options.
What we need to do is change the system from the inside. We need to stop putting the emphasis on University training. It takes three/four years to get through a uni Comp Sci course, and then you are minimally qualified for the job. We need to start giving out sysadmin and other such jobs based on practical tests (somewhat like interviews are used for secretarial work). The major question should be can they make this work, and notdo they have a BSc Computing from Uni Melb.
The fact is that three people from my year nine extension computing class ended up running our school's systems, because the sysadmin (who moved on to higher things) didn't know anything. When there was an issue with
net send * hello
being executed the big guns were called in. They disabled all the icons on the desktop and put in a single folder of shortcuts instead. NT4. They didn't disable, or even audit, cmd, net or any of the other usefuls. They hadn't disabled downloads (they disabled telnet so it was a good 15 seconds before puTTY was on the computers). They knew nothing. But the techies had bits of paper saying "so-and-so passed such-and-such computer course".
Employment decisions should be based on demonstrable practical knowledge, not bits of paper.
Once this is done the system will change itself; those people savvy in the ways of technology will ask for a change of system. They will ridicule the continued use of Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000 and will start using a cheaper, arguably better webserver like Apache. Without these changes how long before the Australian government spends God-knows-how-much on Windows 2003?
The point is to highlight the facts in a very public forum.
Sorry, but parliament is not exactly a very public forum. Big Brother Up Late got better ratings than Senate Question Time (Late rerun). Big Brother Up Late is watching people sleep. Literally.
Someone intelligent below pointed out the $4M Alston departmental website. I agree, it needs to be pointed out, but nothing will eventuate unless this waste of money is shown to everyone. Not only does everyone need to be made aware of the amount spent, they have to be aware of the other available options. My mother, knowing nothing about computers, would think it perfectly reasonable to spend $1.4M on website development. She has no idea that there is an alternative.
What we need to do is bring it to the public's attention that there are viable alternatives (OSS) which cost less. And we can't do that simply through the parliamentary process, and with our current media companies we won't get it on the mass media. I'm afraid talks in parliament arn't enough. Ideas anyone?
As a politically involved geek and Australian I feel obliged to post.
I'm lucky in that I have a Comp Sci degree from a university that has a strong focus on Unix and its derivatives, but I know a lot of people who are trained purely in MS and Oracle stuff.
Too true. I know for a fact that UTas (University of Tasmania) offers a standard of CompSci and sylabus similar to most other Australian universities - and its all MS based, plus a little Java for programming. I think there's a short section on *nix but it's all microsoft.
Most people working in the field now however are not the young technically-minded people, who know everything, but are people with TAFE certificates in one specialised area of computer administration. I once had a sysadmin who, running an NT4 network, didn't know what the 'net' command did. But he moved on. Up to the department of education centralised servers!
Unfortunatly most of the people working in the governments as admins know about their little bit - they know how to ghost, how to audit, and how to set up accounts. They arn't your average geek. This is of course just my experience.
IMHO, if the government employed people who actually knew what they were doing and were interested then by now we would have switched to OSS.
And what if I want to communicate more than once every four years? Or more than just a single Boolean statement regarding him and his policies, all lumped together?
These are physical radio waves, you are dumping them on my property and I can't do what I want with them?
Absolutly. The company has no right to sue you for simply decoding the signals which are being sent to your house. If you were leeching cable, and physically damaged it, that would be a different matter. I don't know how the bypass system in question works, but as long as it doesn't represent you as someone else its not fraud. If you arn't SENDING any data, well its yours to recieve. The only problem is (and I don't know about this, I dont live in the US) might be illegality of technology to break encrypted signals. Is this illegal? Doesn't the DCMA make it illegal or something? The whole "This message has been ROT26 encrypted: you are currently breaking the law by viewing it". However, if that is true they can't be sued by DTV and instead should be prosecuted under federal law.
Logically I can see no reason why these lawsuits should hold up. But IANAL - perhaps there is something which protects big business. But you're right, IMHO. If it's broadcast to everyone, and I'm one of everyone, just try and stop me from decoding it, simply as a cryptographic exercise!
and in the states......it would cost $200 a month, have a DL cap at 10gigs, and only allow uploads at 128k.
im moving to japan, whos with me?
I can see why you want to do this, and I think it is a good idea. but why do we have to move. I'm sure with the right advertising a co-operative non-profit organisation designed to bring broadband of this quality to every urban home in major centres around the US (and the world) would be effective
Think: we set it up, get some decent news coverage, go to progressive politicians... then we ask for some cash in advance, set it up as a co-operative organisation, to keep costs down, and put in this link. Go gigabit. We would undermine all these corps who cap at 10gb and limit uploads. Here in Australia we are capped at 3gb! We need to fix this... and by creating a co-operative we can. You could even charge extra per gb over, say, 20, but at cost. If we all work together then we can all have this for this price.
I know that most of this will be touted as communist crap, but just think about it. Go off, do a cost-benefit analysis. Crunch some numbers. I'm sure you could get it to work in the big cities at least. If you can get some politicians to support it then you might get more ordinary people in as well - all the better.
My $0.02 for today... just a thought. Please don't flame me too badly... It is an idea, nothing more.
what exactly is SERVE? is it a website? a program? an authentication scheme? I browsed over the article looking for that, and didn't see it.
Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment Second paragraph.
As far as my views on this issue: I don't think secure voting is possible at this time, and thanks to the ease of identity theft it will never be possible. And identity theft will stay easy, unless many privacy rights are violated; hence, keep it the way it is. Or at least, keep it voting in booths with paper.
Why should it be illegal to perform a mathematical transform on the EM passing through your own head?
IANAL, but I think this is illegal in the US. Why? Because it is decrypting something intentionally encrypted.
Yes, it is a stupid, senseless law, but it is still a law. I am all for breaking it, but know that if you do, you are still susceptible to punishment, despite the stupidity of the law.
What you have to do in these circumstances is publish your cryptanalysis (which I assume this was) in the JOC. Then you don't get arrested for scientific research. You could even take out a patent (software-patent style) and make semi-legitimate money until such decryption devices are specifically regulated.
Wise words indeed. I think it is probable that instead of estimating the value of an MP3 collection at the legal-download cost (what is it, $1 per song? Less with albums?) they will estimate at the cost of CDs (which is something like 5 times that). So the peanalties won't be reasonable.
Anyway, I think it's cool. Just give me some reasons.
LAN parties. It is relativly easy to carry around an ATX computer... but to get a 17-21" monitor? LCDs are good, but imagine one that folded up. You could store it inside your case in transport!
"Better than it was" is not exactly a shining example of liberty.... <snip rant about freedoms or lack thereof>
Ok, so maybe i was wrong about that. But that was not the point of my comment
Besides, this is not talking about limitation of freedom.
It is exactly that. How on earth can you attempt the argument it is anything else?
Consider: something is illegal. Hence you do not have a right to do it. Simple. It is limitation of freedom, but it isn't unfair limitation of freedom. The US system of democracy elected people who made the decision to allow the continuation of and to support copyright law. You say further on that
when the people have decided the law is no longer just (as they essentially have in the case of file sharing) then it is time for we, the people to abridge or abolish those laws as we see fit.
Well, then write to your congressmen (note the use of a prepositon). Do something about it. However it is my conjecture (MHO, nothing else) that if someone stood for congress (parliament here) with the platform of abolishing copyright laws not only would they not be elected, even if they were they are one voice in however many are in congress.
Yes, anyone can afford to copy a page from a book, but it is illegal...
Not in the US. Sorry for you if this is the case in Australia. Wouldn't surprise me one bit, however, given all the other nonsense that government has been trying to lock down the internet.
Really? Here we have signs in all libraries - state, local, national, school, university - which say "Note that under the copyright act 1968 it is illeal to take more than a 'reasonable portion' of a work without the express permission of the author" etc. I have since discovered that a "reasonable portion" refers to 10 pages. Oops. But it still isn't a whole book.
...what I download is mostly because it is difficult to get elsewhere...
More elitist bullshit. It is either ethical or it is not. If you cannot figure out how to get that album without "stealing" it then perhaps it is not your "right" to enjoy it. Or perhaps you could just try applying some logical consistency to your argument and see how none of it really matters.
Actually, I agree. That is what I'm saying. What I'm doing is illegal, and I recognize that. However, most people don't. What I do is legally wrong, I recognize and accept it. By trying to justify it, I am simply doing further wrong.
Please note: IANAL, #include "disclaimer.h", all that jazz. This is just my opinion. I am probably wrong. I should have stated that in the first post... and I sort-of did with the whole <rant> thing... but not explicitly enough.
Also please note that I am dealing with what I know; Australian law, and what I know of US law from brief studies.
Certainly some of your links and information has enlightened me. Thanks.
Pretty soon time will be copyrighted and so will words.
Are you implying that people copyrighting music they write and play is going against the general idea of copyright?
People copyrighting music is precisly what copyright is about. It is their intellectual property, they crafted it with their very hands^H^H^H^H^Hminds.
I see a lot of (IMHO unnecessary) anti-communism on this site (by commenters mainly) which is in the same post as statements which seem to advocate the total abolition of copyright. Make up your mind people... with the aboloition of copyright (as implicitly suggested by TyrranzzX) would be a very communisitic thing to do. It is up to you.
This is my second pro-copyright post for today, but let me make it clear; I do download music illegally. I do watch DivX versions of movies. But I also buy CDs, listen to (commercial) radio, rent videos, go to the movies... I download things not because I don't want to pay for them, but because I've already paid for them, and am now obtaining a more permenent copy, more easily transportable etc.
The RIAA and US government have gone too far in attempting to keep copyright sacred; but most posters on/. have gone too far in the other direction. Look at what you are advocating, read what you are saying. Preview, and then post.
Shit happens. It's not our government's job to protect us from knowledge and information... unlike in those "free" countries you mentioned.
<rant>
Propaganda alert! Perhaps you should note that freedoms in Russia and China are not as bad as they have been. While you aren't free to sue your microwave manufacturer when you put a dog in the microwave, you can still do pretty much anything, especially online. Besides, this is not talking about limitation of freedom.
Now, I'm just as guilty as the next guy, but what I download is mostly because it is difficult to get elsewhere. I mean, where they hell am i going to get the latest Claire's Birthday album? (CB is an Estonian band).
It is in fact the job of the government to regulate laws which were put into place, including copyright laws. Yes, anyone can afford to copy a page from a book, but it is illegal. If you are caught copying a whole book (by your analogy the whole song/movie, rather than just one second) then you are arrested, fined etc. It is much more difficult to copy an entire book than it is to copy digitised anything. And one copy is still only one copy. It is probably more expensive to copy a whole book than buy one. $0.05 per page, 400 A4 pages, $20. The latest Harry Potter from Amazon (896 pages) - $17.99. That is why the publishers stay in business. It is cheaper to buy the actual book, and better quality, binding etc. However, when the cost of pirating an entire CD is less than $1 more people do it. So the RIAA has a point.
Yes, I pirate music. I don't do enough to make it very bad (maybe two hours worth in the last 12 months), but I recognize it for what it is. A crime. And IIRC it is a crime which often crosses state boundries, and hence should be enforced by the FBI.
IANAL, plus I'm in Australia. But I think I know what I'm talking about.
when one company [microsoft] simply uses those government-granted rights...., the government sues it for abusing those rights....If it becomes such a bad thing that the government itself wishes to use only copyleft software, there is something fundamentally flawed either in the government decision or the copyright law.
I disagree. As we all should know, rights come with responsibilities. MS didn't abuse their copyright, what they did was (allegedly) break corporations law. This has nothing to do with copyright; they maintained comercial in confidence, not copyright, over Windows source code. This is something else.
No-one has accused MS of breaking copyright law or abusing their copyrights, at least, not within a court of law.
The decision to use open-source software is good because it can save the government money. Consider running a departmental webserver. You can set up IIS on Win2k3 for US$1,099. That's the 10-client version; each extra client costs US$169. And those are amazon prices. Whereas you can download (don't worry, I'm sure all governments have this ability) *nix and Apache+mod_whatever-you-want for free. Doesn't come with 8kg of manuals, sure, but you can either (1) buy them or (2) check the internet. The cost saving is enormous, and by some OSS is conidered to present better products.
Sorry for rambling a bit, but simply on cost-analysis grounds (as has been mentioned in another comment) OSS is better for governments.
Well, actually, as you so clearly demonstrated we as humans don't need error checking. We can tell things from context... so as long as the error is less than 10% and it's all human readable data, there really is no problem.
Your 'error' was 11 characters of a 38 character message (~29%), and everyone can still see what you mean.
Slashdot Mirror
I love your suggestion.
So I've started a website.
http://mjec.net/abaps.html
but since you are an unknowing accomplise, perhaps you should get a (smaller!) fine of some time?
So if someone trojans my computer and my computer is used as part of a DDoS attack, should I be punished? I'm an "unkowing accomplise" - why not?
If you are truly serious about studying the Bible as a living book, and not as a museum piece, then pick up a New King James or NIV version. These are easily readable and accurately reflect centuries of scholarship.
Thanks for the dogma, but I think this release is meant more for the fact that the GB is a museam piece. It is interesting not beacuse it's a bible - they're easy to come by - but because it was one of the first books made with movable type. It could be The Truth by Terry Pratchett for all anyone cares about the content.
unless it's changed or you're doing it in Hobart
Hobart. Besides, the point of my post was more in the problems with incompetent uninterested techies being hired.
please attack the real substance (i.e. the point) of my post, not my specific examples.
Do you really think you can embarrass them by their choice of Operating System?
As I've said before the parliament is unfortunatly not a public forum anyway. Even if excessive expenditure was revealed, it wouldn't work, because people don't know about other options.
What we need to do is change the system from the inside. We need to stop putting the emphasis on University training. It takes three/four years to get through a uni Comp Sci course, and then you are minimally qualified for the job. We need to start giving out sysadmin and other such jobs based on practical tests (somewhat like interviews are used for secretarial work). The major question should be can they make this work, and not do they have a BSc Computing from Uni Melb.
The fact is that three people from my year nine extension computing class ended up running our school's systems, because the sysadmin (who moved on to higher things) didn't know anything. When there was an issue with being executed the big guns were called in. They disabled all the icons on the desktop and put in a single folder of shortcuts instead. NT4. They didn't disable, or even audit, cmd, net or any of the other usefuls. They hadn't disabled downloads (they disabled telnet so it was a good 15 seconds before puTTY was on the computers). They knew nothing.
But the techies had bits of paper saying "so-and-so passed such-and-such computer course".
Employment decisions should be based on demonstrable practical knowledge, not bits of paper.
Once this is done the system will change itself; those people savvy in the ways of technology will ask for a change of system. They will ridicule the continued use of Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000 and will start using a cheaper, arguably better webserver like Apache. Without these changes how long before the Australian government spends God-knows-how-much on Windows 2003?
The point is to highlight the facts in a very public forum.
Sorry, but parliament is not exactly a very public forum. Big Brother Up Late got better ratings than Senate Question Time (Late rerun). Big Brother Up Late is watching people sleep. Literally.
Someone intelligent below pointed out the $4M Alston departmental website. I agree, it needs to be pointed out, but nothing will eventuate unless this waste of money is shown to everyone. Not only does everyone need to be made aware of the amount spent, they have to be aware of the other available options. My mother, knowing nothing about computers, would think it perfectly reasonable to spend $1.4M on website development. She has no idea that there is an alternative.
What we need to do is bring it to the public's attention that there are viable alternatives (OSS) which cost less. And we can't do that simply through the parliamentary process, and with our current media companies we won't get it on the mass media. I'm afraid talks in parliament arn't enough. Ideas anyone?
As a politically involved geek and Australian I feel obliged to post.
I'm lucky in that I have a Comp Sci degree from a university that has a strong focus on Unix and its derivatives, but I know a lot of people who are trained purely in MS and Oracle stuff.
Too true. I know for a fact that UTas (University of Tasmania) offers a standard of CompSci and sylabus similar to most other Australian universities - and its all MS based, plus a little Java for programming. I think there's a short section on *nix but it's all microsoft.
Most people working in the field now however are not the young technically-minded people, who know everything, but are people with TAFE certificates in one specialised area of computer administration. I once had a sysadmin who, running an NT4 network, didn't know what the 'net' command did. But he moved on. Up to the department of education centralised servers!
Unfortunatly most of the people working in the governments as admins know about their little bit - they know how to ghost, how to audit, and how to set up accounts. They arn't your average geek. This is of course just my experience.
IMHO, if the government employed people who actually knew what they were doing and were interested then by now we would have switched to OSS.
M(NS)HO.
...it's 5 am in the morning...
As opposed to 5am at night?
(I know, -1 offtopic. miah)
These are physical radio waves, you are dumping them on my property and I can't do what I want with them?
Absolutly. The company has no right to sue you for simply decoding the signals which are being sent to your house. If you were leeching cable, and physically damaged it, that would be a different matter. I don't know how the bypass system in question works, but as long as it doesn't represent you as someone else its not fraud. If you arn't SENDING any data, well its yours to recieve. The only problem is (and I don't know about this, I dont live in the US) might be illegality of technology to break encrypted signals. Is this illegal? Doesn't the DCMA make it illegal or something? The whole "This message has been ROT26 encrypted: you are currently breaking the law by viewing it". However, if that is true they can't be sued by DTV and instead should be prosecuted under federal law.
Logically I can see no reason why these lawsuits should hold up. But IANAL - perhaps there is something which protects big business. But you're right, IMHO. If it's broadcast to everyone, and I'm one of everyone, just try and stop me from decoding it, simply as a cryptographic exercise!
Think: we set it up, get some decent news coverage, go to progressive politicians... then we ask for some cash in advance, set it up as a co-operative organisation, to keep costs down, and put in this link. Go gigabit. We would undermine all these corps who cap at 10gb and limit uploads. Here in Australia we are capped at 3gb! We need to fix this... and by creating a co-operative we can. You could even charge extra per gb over, say, 20, but at cost. If we all work together then we can all have this for this price.
I know that most of this will be touted as communist crap, but just think about it. Go off, do a cost-benefit analysis. Crunch some numbers. I'm sure you could get it to work in the big cities at least. If you can get some politicians to support it then you might get more ordinary people in as well - all the better.
My $0.02 for today... just a thought. Please don't flame me too badly... It is an idea, nothing more.
Second paragraph.
As far as my views on this issue: I don't think secure voting is possible at this time, and thanks to the ease of identity theft it will never be possible. And identity theft will stay easy, unless many privacy rights are violated; hence, keep it the way it is. Or at least, keep it voting in booths with paper.
Why should it be illegal to perform a mathematical transform on the EM passing through your own head?
IANAL, but I think this is illegal in the US. Why? Because it is decrypting something intentionally encrypted.
Yes, it is a stupid, senseless law, but it is still a law. I am all for breaking it, but know that if you do, you are still susceptible to punishment, despite the stupidity of the law.
What you have to do in these circumstances is publish your cryptanalysis (which I assume this was) in the JOC. Then you don't get arrested for scientific research. You could even take out a patent (software-patent style) and make semi-legitimate money until such decryption devices are specifically regulated.
They're Australian... They already live in a penal colony. What do they have to lose...
As an Australian I find that remark very true.
assuming reasonable penalties
Wise words indeed. I think it is probable that instead of estimating the value of an MP3 collection at the legal-download cost (what is it, $1 per song? Less with albums?) they will estimate at the cost of CDs (which is something like 5 times that). So the peanalties won't be reasonable.
Ce la vie, I guess.
Anyway, I think it's cool. Just give me some reasons.
LAN parties. It is relativly easy to carry around an ATX computer... but to get a 17-21" monitor? LCDs are good, but imagine one that folded up. You could store it inside your case in transport!
<snip rant about freedoms or lack thereof>
Ok, so maybe i was wrong about that. But that was not the point of my comment
It is exactly that. How on earth can you attempt the argument it is anything else?
Consider: something is illegal. Hence you do not have a right to do it. Simple. It is limitation of freedom, but it isn't unfair limitation of freedom. The US system of democracy elected people who made the decision to allow the continuation of and to support copyright law. You say further on that
when the people have decided the law is no longer just (as they essentially have in the case of file sharing) then it is time for we, the people to abridge or abolish those laws as we see fit.
Well, then write to your congressmen (note the use of a prepositon). Do something about it. However it is my conjecture (MHO, nothing else) that if someone stood for congress (parliament here) with the platform of abolishing copyright laws not only would they not be elected, even if they were they are one voice in however many are in congress.
Not in the US. Sorry for you if this is the case in Australia. Wouldn't surprise me one bit, however, given all the other nonsense that government has been trying to lock down the internet.
Really? Here we have signs in all libraries - state, local, national, school, university - which say "Note that under the copyright act 1968 it is illeal to take more than a 'reasonable portion' of a work without the express permission of the author" etc. I have since discovered that a "reasonable portion" refers to 10 pages. Oops. But it still isn't a whole book.
More elitist bullshit. It is either ethical or it is not. If you cannot figure out how to get that album without "stealing" it then perhaps it is not your "right" to enjoy it. Or perhaps you could just try applying some logical consistency to your argument and see how none of it really matters.
Actually, I agree. That is what I'm saying. What I'm doing is illegal, and I recognize that. However, most people don't. What I do is legally wrong, I recognize and accept it. By trying to justify it, I am simply doing further wrong.
Please note: IANAL, #include "disclaimer.h", all that jazz. This is just my opinion. I am probably wrong. I should have stated that in the first post... and I sort-of did with the whole <rant> thing... but not explicitly enough.
Also please note that I am dealing with what I know; Australian law, and what I know of US law from brief studies.
Certainly some of your links and information has enlightened me. Thanks.
Mjec
Pretty soon time will be copyrighted and so will words.
/. have gone too far in the other direction. Look at what you are advocating, read what you are saying. Preview, and then post.
Are you implying that people copyrighting music they write and play is going against the general idea of copyright?
People copyrighting music is precisly what copyright is about. It is their intellectual property, they crafted it with their very hands^H^H^H^H^Hminds.
I see a lot of (IMHO unnecessary) anti-communism on this site (by commenters mainly) which is in the same post as statements which seem to advocate the total abolition of copyright. Make up your mind people... with the aboloition of copyright (as implicitly suggested by TyrranzzX) would be a very communisitic thing to do. It is up to you.
This is my second pro-copyright post for today, but let me make it clear; I do download music illegally. I do watch DivX versions of movies. But I also buy CDs, listen to (commercial) radio, rent videos, go to the movies... I download things not because I don't want to pay for them, but because I've already paid for them, and am now obtaining a more permenent copy, more easily transportable etc.
The RIAA and US government have gone too far in attempting to keep copyright sacred; but most posters on
Mjec
Propaganda alert! Perhaps you should note that freedoms in Russia and China are not as bad as they have been. While you aren't free to sue your microwave manufacturer when you put a dog in the microwave, you can still do pretty much anything, especially online. Besides, this is not talking about limitation of freedom.
Now, I'm just as guilty as the next guy, but what I download is mostly because it is difficult to get elsewhere. I mean, where they hell am i going to get the latest Claire's Birthday album? (CB is an Estonian band).
It is in fact the job of the government to regulate laws which were put into place, including copyright laws. Yes, anyone can afford to copy a page from a book, but it is illegal. If you are caught copying a whole book (by your analogy the whole song/movie, rather than just one second) then you are arrested, fined etc. It is much more difficult to copy an entire book than it is to copy digitised anything. And one copy is still only one copy. It is probably more expensive to copy a whole book than buy one. $0.05 per page, 400 A4 pages, $20. The latest Harry Potter from Amazon (896 pages) - $17.99. That is why the publishers stay in business. It is cheaper to buy the actual book, and better quality, binding etc. However, when the cost of pirating an entire CD is less than $1 more people do it. So the RIAA has a point.
Yes, I pirate music. I don't do enough to make it very bad (maybe two hours worth in the last 12 months), but I recognize it for what it is. A crime. And IIRC it is a crime which often crosses state boundries, and hence should be enforced by the FBI.
IANAL, plus I'm in Australia. But I think I know what I'm talking about.
Mjec
</rant>
I disagree. As we all should know, rights come with responsibilities. MS didn't abuse their copyright, what they did was (allegedly) break corporations law. This has nothing to do with copyright; they maintained comercial in confidence, not copyright, over Windows source code. This is something else.
--MjecNo-one has accused MS of breaking copyright law or abusing their copyrights, at least, not within a court of law.
The decision to use open-source software is good because it can save the government money. Consider running a departmental webserver. You can set up IIS on Win2k3 for US$1,099. That's the 10-client version; each extra client costs US$169. And those are amazon prices. Whereas you can download (don't worry, I'm sure all governments have this ability) *nix and Apache+mod_whatever-you-want for free. Doesn't come with 8kg of manuals, sure, but you can either (1) buy them or (2) check the internet. The cost saving is enormous, and by some OSS is conidered to present better products.
Sorry for rambling a bit, but simply on cost-analysis grounds (as has been mentioned in another comment) OSS is better for governments.
(so I can't spell, sue me)
Well, actually, as you so clearly demonstrated we as humans don't need error checking. We can tell things from context... so as long as the error is less than 10% and it's all human readable data, there really is no problem.
Your 'error' was 11 characters of a 38 character message (~29%), and everyone can still see what you mean.