Yes, we all want OSDN "stuff" to win out in as many possible applicable sectors, buisness, personal, government, etc. because we believe is is The Right Way on many levels.
I concur with folks expressing the opinion that legislating Open Source alternatives into government budgets is incorrect, because it is on principle - at no time should we ever, as a society, legislate any single thing as the "right way". Only GM for cars? Only Apple for music? Only MS-terminals for voting? We'd all revolt against this.
However, this isn't legislation - it's a directive from a state official, which isn't the same. Your elected official in your state of Massachusetts has made a determination and pushed forward a directive s/he feels is in the best interest of the state's citizens. Do I agree? Yes. Why? Simply on the principles that OSDN projects use open standards anyone can code to. Microsoft only opens standards when they see money-making opportunities in licensing, which is, well, buisness - they're supposed to make money, they're a company!:) I think the people are best served by a government that uses tools that came from the people themselves unfettered with political or monetary influence. Linux & OSDN projects have offered this alternative to humanity for the first time in force, as have all other open-source type projects.
The "correct" place for this debate I think, is in the courts. Someone needs to file for a public injunction against a government agency buying Microsoft products to force the question of "were alternatives considered?" with an independant investigator that has the authority to disqualify Microsoft if they try to use their money or influence to force purchasing decisions through monetary ends. This is no different from anything else the government buys - cars, military hardware, paper, staples, etc.
A base problem that boggles me is that software is a commodity as I think of it - the best producer with a solution is just that. MS of course doesn't want you to believe this, but I think the reality of "software" as a whole is that we're moving to software as a commodity item that doesn't make it bland, but specialized and much more creatively rich through the adoption of common contexts and languages to express out programming needs. MS wants to "own" those contexts, and therein lies the sin most would like to accuse them of.
We could use a whole force of small companies going to the courts claiming legitimately they have been picked on by Microsoft because they dumped several gazillion into the re-election coffers of the Congress critter on the Committee for (X) and the obvious results.
Microsoft is a de facto standard, so of course, *anything* that isn't Microsoft will be perceived as good - we need to be careful netizens about that and make sure the public understands we're offering an alternative that needs to be examined, not a replacement bourne out of hate.
Is the InterNet going to become the domain of government and corporate interest, for whom the line is blurring every day? Or is it going to become the digital commons most Slashdotters, I would guess want it to develop into or remain?
We need to start expressing our complicated technical concepts in laypeople's terms the average citizen can comprehend and find a way to deliver that to the masses that interests them otherwise we're never going to get across that these misguided requests for non-security are really veiled corporate protectionism.
How do we band together to run our own TV ads, press runs, etc., etc.?
While some may call this nitpicky, I constantly am on the receiving end of many many otherwise informed folks that think that ICMP PING is an accurate test of network performance.
It's not.
PING was intended for reachability checking, and as a secondary feature, response time.
The ICMP part of most IP stacks often has the lowest priority to receive CPU time in a lot of IP stack implementations. When you PING, the return packet back to you is at the mercy of the resources of the system writing, generating, and spitting that packet back across to you, and if its' CPU is busy, you're going to get a high latency time that is not accurate. For those of you with Cisco gear or really anyone's network kit, try pinging a router when it's busy doing routing calculations (like OSPF LSA expiry or an Area-0 event).
The only accurate way to test the end-to-end throughput, goodput, latency, and jitter, is to stream packets from one end to another and measure across time. See the NTOOLS or HPING projects on FreshMeat, etc.
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Yes, we all want OSDN "stuff" to win out in as many possible applicable sectors, buisness, personal, government, etc. because we believe is is The Right Way on many levels.
:) I think the people are best served by a government that uses tools that came from the people themselves unfettered with political or monetary influence. Linux & OSDN projects have offered this alternative to humanity for the first time in force, as have all other open-source type projects.
I concur with folks expressing the opinion that legislating Open Source alternatives into government budgets is incorrect, because it is on principle - at no time should we ever, as a society, legislate any single thing as the "right way". Only GM for cars? Only Apple for music? Only MS-terminals for voting? We'd all revolt against this.
However, this isn't legislation - it's a directive from a state official, which isn't the same. Your elected official in your state of Massachusetts has made a determination and pushed forward a directive s/he feels is in the best interest of the state's citizens. Do I agree? Yes. Why? Simply on the principles that OSDN projects use open standards anyone can code to. Microsoft only opens standards when they see money-making opportunities in licensing, which is, well, buisness - they're supposed to make money, they're a company!
The "correct" place for this debate I think, is in the courts. Someone needs to file for a public injunction against a government agency buying Microsoft products to force the question of "were alternatives considered?" with an independant investigator that has the authority to disqualify Microsoft if they try to use their money or influence to force purchasing decisions through monetary ends. This is no different from anything else the government buys - cars, military hardware, paper, staples, etc.
A base problem that boggles me is that software is a commodity as I think of it - the best producer with a solution is just that. MS of course doesn't want you to believe this, but I think the reality of "software" as a whole is that we're moving to software as a commodity item that doesn't make it bland, but specialized and much more creatively rich through the adoption of common contexts and languages to express out programming needs. MS wants to "own" those contexts, and therein lies the sin most would like to accuse them of.
We could use a whole force of small companies going to the courts claiming legitimately they have been picked on by Microsoft because they dumped several gazillion into the re-election coffers of the Congress critter on the Committee for (X) and the obvious results.
Microsoft is a de facto standard, so of course, *anything* that isn't Microsoft will be perceived as good - we need to be careful netizens about that and make sure the public understands we're offering an alternative that needs to be examined, not a replacement bourne out of hate.
Is the InterNet going to become the domain of government and corporate interest, for whom the line is blurring every day? Or is it going to become the digital commons most Slashdotters, I would guess want it to develop into or remain? We need to start expressing our complicated technical concepts in laypeople's terms the average citizen can comprehend and find a way to deliver that to the masses that interests them otherwise we're never going to get across that these misguided requests for non-security are really veiled corporate protectionism. How do we band together to run our own TV ads, press runs, etc., etc.?
While some may call this nitpicky, I constantly am on the receiving end of many many otherwise informed folks that think that ICMP PING is an accurate test of network performance.
It's not.
PING was intended for reachability checking, and as a secondary feature, response time.
The ICMP part of most IP stacks often has the lowest priority to receive CPU time in a lot of IP stack implementations. When you PING, the return packet back to you is at the mercy of the resources of the system writing, generating, and spitting that packet back across to you, and if its' CPU is busy, you're going to get a high latency time that is not accurate. For those of you with Cisco gear or really anyone's network kit, try pinging a router when it's busy doing routing calculations (like OSPF LSA expiry or an Area-0 event).
The only accurate way to test the end-to-end throughput, goodput, latency, and jitter, is to stream packets from one end to another and measure across time. See the NTOOLS or HPING projects on FreshMeat, etc.