Embarrassing Governments Into Adopting Open Source

caitsith01 writes "An effort is currently underway to embarrass the Australian Federal Government into adopting open source software. As this story explains, the Australian Democrats have put questions on notice in Parliament that will require all government ministers to disclose how much money their departments spend on Microsoft products each year. The idea is to force open source issues to the fore by showing just how much money Microsoft receives from the government. It could be a smart approach - the average taxpayer knows little or nothing about OSS, but will rapidly form and express vocal opinions about the government wasting money. The article also mentions that a bill may be introduced to Federal Parliament to mandate the consideration of open source solutions (you may remember this story about an Australian state trying to introduce similar legislation). Some quotes from the article: "What the country doesn't need is to be tied into a profit-maximising licensing system, and the way to combat that is to get government to break out of the paradigm." On the other hand, the (right wing) Liberal Party criticises suggestions that use of open source should be compulsory as "hi-tech affirmative action.""

You know...

[craenor]

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?

Huh?

[whereiswaldo]

affirmative action: "an active effort to improve the employment or educational opportunities of members of minority groups and women"

That's a bad thing?

Pauline Hanson

[MarkusQ]

If Pauline Hanson (assuming she's still around--people like her never seem to go away) responds to this in any way, I hope someone down under posts her comments.

I haven't had a good laugh in a while.

-- MarkusQ

Re:Not quite ready

[arvindn]

Please.. think before you troll.

Huh, what do you expect from someone whose username is "egg troll", and URL is "http://www.microsoft.com" ? ;-D

Sally Secretary was using Unix ...

[mec]

... before Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard.

That is, Sally Secretary at AT&T Bell Laboratories was using Unix to type up patent applications.

In retrospect, Bell Labs must have bad some bad-ass secretaries!

Re:Not quite ready

[Anonymous Coward]

In MS Office, Sally frequently gets "It appears you are typing a letter" message. Does she know how to turn it off?

It appears you are posting to Slashdot. Would you like to:

• Post a serious comment
• Troll
• Karma whore
• CmdrTaco

Instead of embarrasing gov'ts to adopt open source

[Ilan Volow]

I think we should embarrass open source developers into making their desktop software usable.

Bill Gates was using Unix ...

[leonbrooks]

...after he dropped out of Harvard. It was called Xenix, there was one on every desktop in Microsoft, and it was the next Great White Hope. Being Microsoft, of course they passionfingered that as well - but you get that. (-: