*Wooooosh*

I totally agree with your point of view. I think that there are many reasons our administrations should require opensource for their projects:

• there is a real public audit of the software, should it still be developped by a selected corporation
• money is not lost for private parties, as in, they are many things that could benefit other people, companies.. If it's the taxpayers' money, what can be more transparent to give it back this way to them?
• it lowers the risk of lock-ins for the administrations, that usually end by costing a lot more when you need to buy again a new solution 3 years later..

I think there is a lot to write & tell about how the many general reasons to endorse opensource could be adapted to the government / administration specifics, in terms of local economy growth, global service & quality improvement of software, ability to share more easily the load between cities/states/whatever and so on..

All of this is nit picking over the definition of the word 'right'. It has more than one meaning! Generally, the precise meaning is determined by who we are saying is 'giving' the right - and in the case of 'basic human rights' we usually imply that either 'the natural order of things' or $DEITY 'gave' the rights. All rights do not have to be innate though - I can contractually give you a right of access across my land. In the case of TFA we are talking about a government / constitutionally granted right. Ok? Can we all stop arguing semantics now? Kthx.

The article sounds indeed more like a rant made public about a problem. Of course, this doesn't deny there is problems with 9.10, but heh, it was in alpha/beta, as the others, and nothing really "that serious" was pointed out I think. Anyway, people ranting loudly enough to make it to The Register may learn that they can also participate in testing the releases..

As for my story, I was running 9.10 since alpha, and it went quite nicely.. Minor pulseaudio glitches that were solved over time and so on. At work and on my laptop, I've upgraded from Jaunty to Karmic when offered to do so by the update manager, and it went nicely too. No problem here, not even a dependency issue, it really went fine, and 2.6.31 is really nice to my setups ;)

About all this issue.. I can't help but think it's more a PR prank than a real spotted issue.. The bugtracker doesn't tell that "that many" users are impacted, and also, that it may be more due to a ATI-card weirdness.. Heh. Not ubuntu's fault in the end, even if they could have worked around it..

That one http://www.venganza.org/ ?

What about incentives like Niftyname, an opensource HaaS system made by a French ISP? Or oVirt, the virtualization system from RedHat? Given how the "cloud" is ready today, I'd say those things are far from being late.. Maybe they need more attention?

Neal 666 votes / 11%

There is something out there, told ya!

If you don't want to look at code, however bad it is, it doesn't mean you should necessarily turn to proprietary software (or even "not fight for F/OSS).. Which is somehow his point. If locked on proprietary software, his only option was to ask the editor to correct the bug. Which may or may not be willing to do so.

With opensource software, he could have hired someone to waste his time on it, even if the original developper wouldn't have been willing to do so.. Plus it could have been a nice contribution, so probably for a lower price, he could have had his software up&running, and made the software better..

And anyway, just by reading that: "which I can find out by other means than looking at source code", we can probably assume the technical details aren't exactly relevant to him.

What exactly would have changed if it had not been free software?

Actually, there is one website which has switched to Silverlight.. I'm not sure why they did, but it made me very unhappy:
http://www.ryanair.com/site/EN/dests.php?flash=chk

This is a map to show the possible routes from Ryanair airports. They now have included a list of their routes so people can read from it instead of their silverlight map, but still.. I've installed the plugin, and this still doesn't work.

So of course, no, we don't want that MS thing, but at a point.. it's like Flash, if webmasters start to use it, better have some support that works than just whine about who made it in the first place..

Or they could do.. whatever.. and you'd still die in the end.

They will only do that for piracy issues, because someone is paying for that directly. Not sure how the maths work if you compare it to how much the taxpayers pay. I'd rather have my government/police work and actually spend money on fighting true spam/virii issues rather than going after P2P users..

I actually thought about that, and couldn't find any nice interface to be able to manage Samba/LDAP users & configuration. The furthest I could go was going for an OpenLDAP GUI, which is not enough for a "manager" to work on such an environment..

I'd be interested in any FOSS opportunities to manage that using a GUI (may it be web based or not..., but then has to be able to run on Windows :p), without having to go through the hassle of writing it myself (or have it written by someone from scratch).

So, if anybody went through something that might fit here, I'd be really interested! Even if it's alpha, pre alpha, only brain work.. Even if it's not free as in free beer..