Customers cannot be purchase or fired, and it's really hard to ship cashiers and stockman overseas, away from the store -- if my cashier is in Mexico, it's kind of hard for her to do a price check in Oregon. You may have mispoke here.
They can't outsource the cashiers, but they can replace them with machines--incidentally, a friend of mine recently posted an amusing story about Walmart's self-checkout machines.
Yeah, that was my first thought when I read the article. While it's clear that open-source games haven't made much of an impact, it's quite a leap to try to relate that to government procurement. Aside from the likes of America's Army, how many games do governments actually commission? I suspect that the creation of most government software doesn't require many artists, musicians, or writers.
Take the current hot topic of e-voting machines--in this case, the user interface/experience is very important (and admittedly, open-source projects have lagged in that department), but the most basic need is for the software to perform its calculations correctly. Only open source would allow any interested citizen to examine the inner workings of the software and ensure that the processes were trustworthy.
Which begs the question--where are the open-source voting machine projects? If the open-source world doesn't offer alternatives, local politicians will have no choice but to buy the existing commercial systems of (unverifiably) dubious quality.
Slashdot Mirror
Customers cannot be purchase or fired, and it's really hard to ship cashiers and stockman overseas, away from the store -- if my cashier is in Mexico, it's kind of hard for her to do a price check in Oregon. You may have mispoke here.
They can't outsource the cashiers, but they can replace them with machines--incidentally, a friend of mine recently posted an amusing story about Walmart's self-checkout machines.
Yeah, that was my first thought when I read the article. While it's clear that open-source games haven't made much of an impact, it's quite a leap to try to relate that to government procurement. Aside from the likes of America's Army, how many games do governments actually commission? I suspect that the creation of most government software doesn't require many artists, musicians, or writers.
Take the current hot topic of e-voting machines--in this case, the user interface/experience is very important (and admittedly, open-source projects have lagged in that department), but the most basic need is for the software to perform its calculations correctly. Only open source would allow any interested citizen to examine the inner workings of the software and ensure that the processes were trustworthy.
Which begs the question--where are the open-source voting machine projects? If the open-source world doesn't offer alternatives, local politicians will have no choice but to buy the existing commercial systems of (unverifiably) dubious quality.