Embarrassing Governments Into Adopting Open Source 459
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.""
where's the payback ? (Score:5, Interesting)
The democrats are usually a non-event, being third party in a two party state, like the liberal party in the UK.
However their founding motto is "keep the bastards honest", and I hope their new policy will include looking for Microsoft payback (election campaign contributions anybody?) as I am sure this will be fruitful.
Re:where's the payback ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am glad to see them doing this sort of thing... even if the system is effectively two party this type of action is a good way for minor parties to raise issues that the major parties would basically ignore.
Re:where's the payback ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:where's the payback ? (Score:5, Informative)
(Amusingly, your nick' is Sad Loser and your
It's not fair (Score:5, Interesting)
Well said (Score:4, Insightful)
Open source is not free (as in beer), particularly on this scale. There are support costs, retraining costs, costs of investigating solutions in the first place...
If we get a proposal that compares genuine TCO for Microsoft with "free" software then of course a mostly uninformed public will jump up and down and ill-informed lobbyists will start clamouring for the money to be saved. Then in five years' time, they'll turn around and wonder what went wrong.
And as we've discussed on Slashdot before, any legislation that mandates the "consideration" of any specific product(s) over others, whether that's Microsoft, open source things or otherwise, is deeply flawed. They should require that everything relevant will be given equal consideration, but since that would be a tacit admission that this doesn't happen at present, we're unlikely to see that any time soon. You'd hope that it didn't require a law for that to be the case anyway, since all such a law would do is open up the floodgates for legal action against the government by every losing product's supporters.
The last bit of the story really said it: it's just hi-tech affirmative action, and affirmative action is rarely as good an idea in the long run as it seems at first.
Re:It's not fair (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:a party like like BSD? (Score:4, Insightful)
An excellent analogy. And, just like BSD, they fork [theage.com.au] every time a couple of the lead figures have a spat. I'm a little sore about the Dems; they did, after all, support the Australian version of the DMCA, but it looks like they might redeem themselves with this sort of thing.
If they manage to survive long enough, that is.
Not quite ready (Score:5, Interesting)
As much as I love Open Source (I'm typing this via Moz on FreeBSD!), I don't think I could recommend it to Sally Secretary quite yet. Its still got a bit more polishing to do. In Gnome, for example, I occasionally get a dialog box that says " occurred. For more information, click on the help button." Naturally there is no help button.
Hopefully, though, a widespread adoption of it as a server OS will encourage those working on its workstation aspects to really get a move on so we can rid the world of MS products.
Need for training at early stages (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a key issue is training of technical people. Most people on
A move for more open source in government should be coupled with a push to bring non-proprietry software back to the core of computer related education. 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.
Re:Need for training at early stages (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Need for training at early stages (Score:4, Informative)
My uni's (USQ in Toowoomba Qld) IT department wants everyone to be using windows, but the Maths and Computing [usq.edu.au] department is pretty much fully Linux. They have two undergraduate labs with only Linux, as well as many courses require the use of at least cygwin. This is a Good Thing. We do programming in GCC, G++ and Java. We had to write HTML using a text editor and networking software using Unix sockets...
A lot of the lecturers even don't use the new system they spent millions on (PeopleSoft) - I can't blame them, it is a lot slower than the old in-house system, even with the new hardware.
It would be good to see other companies get their products used; my mother works in a government department and they moved from Win 3.1 and Lotus Notes to a pretty much MS-only environment... (well of course they do have some specialised software)
Re:Need for training at early stages (Score:4, Interesting)
Wrong. Most probably they would not just use some existing distribution. Neither they will create their own distribution. Most probably they will sign a contract with a company like RedHat to get "ongoing support etc etc etc."
Last time I checked RedHat it was $90/year for the subscribtion with minimal support contract. Most probably they will want better support, and end up paying much more - maybe even more than they are paying to Microsoft.
They could save lots by avoiding this contract, but it never happens - goverments usually like to have a support contract just as companies do (e.g. because goverment bureacrates want to cover their asses). So I doubt government would really save any money.
Re:Not quite ready (Score:4, Interesting)
And the nice thing about OSS is that you don't really need to do mass upgrades to new major versions -- if it's cheaper to make (for example) Linux 2.0 support IPSEC, that's a possible option. It's not a possible with Microsoft (or many closed-source solutions).
Re:Not quite ready (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean, they can check-out the file via CVS, make their enhancement, and then submit their changes to Linus ?
You know we're talking about secretaries, don't you ?
And the nice thing about OSS is that you don't really need to do mass upgrades to new major versions
Let's not take the RedHat vs. Microsoft example then. RedHat drops old versions a lot faster than MS.
You know, if MS doesn't do it, there is probably one reason: It does not make big bucks. And remember all the distros out there are made by companies that care about big bucks also.
Re:Not quite ready (Score:5, Insightful)
You know we're talking about secretaries, don't you ?
*sigh*... That's what a supplier is for.
For example, if Ms. Plunkett the secretary at AcmeCorp realises that the wordprocessor she's using doesn't handle mailmerge, she can call up her organisation's support section. If the support section thinks it's a feature that will be widely needed, they can talk to their supplier (say, IBM) and ask for this feature to be included in the next upgrade. IBM can see if that feature has been implemented in a later version and upgrade AcmeCorp to that version or backport it to AcmeCorp's current version, or they can add it themselves and supply AcmeCorp with that version, or they can farm it out to a third party, or they can finance the original developers to add that feature, or they can tell AcmeCorp that it's not worth their time to add such a feature, in which case AcmeCorp can do the same thing IBM did - add the feature themselves, backport it, pay a third party to implement it, or pay the original developers to include it.
It's so much easier when everybody has equal access to the source, isn't it?
Re:Not quite ready (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean, they can check-out the file via CVS, make their enhancement, and then submit their changes to Linus ?
Wow there is this amazing compiler now called GCC, it takes source code and makes it into an executable program! If Linus doesn't accept it, or it takes a long time to get into the main codebase, you can still compile it yourself, and you can still be running a final product!
You know we're talking about secretaries, don't you ?
Yeah but secretaries aren't that intense in the software that they use. And the secretaries aren't going to be the people out doing the software development. You could take the money wasted on MS software, and pay a person to develop something that is totally custom based off existing code. Hell my parents and my younger sister seem to be able to use linux just fine. OpenOffice, Mozilla, Evolution, all work perfectly well. If gnome doesn't float your bubble, then there's KDE and a billion other WM's. You probably are going to be locking down your secretaries computer from doing advanced features anyways, we don't want her updating DNS records or anything.
Let's not take the RedHat vs. Microsoft example then. RedHat drops old versions a lot faster than MS.
Yeah, except you don't have to pay for newer versions of RedHat. You just continue paying for the support. And the support includes helping you upgrade. The bitch with MS, is that they drop the old software, but that forces you to continue to pay for support AND pay for the newer versions of software. So, IMHO RedHat still beats the crap out of Microsoft.
And remember all the distros out there are made by companies that care about big bucks also.
WRONG. There are a few distros out there made by companies that care about big bucks. How about Gentoo? How about Knoppix? How about Debian? How about College Linux? Or Vine or Rock or IPCop or RedFlag... The list goes on...
Re:Not quite ready (Score:3, Interesting)
Strongly disagree. Most secretaries know Word far better than I ever will. They don't know much software, but the stuff they do know, they know it well. At least good secretaries do.
Re:Not quite ready (Score:4, Informative)
Ahem.
http://www.debian.org/social_contract [debian.org]
Re:Not quite ready (Score:3, Informative)
Ahem.
http://www.debian.org/users [debian.org]
or how about getting outsourced Debian support from Ian Murdock, the IAN in DebIAN?
http://www.progeny.com [progeny.com]
And many organizations ARE using debian, whether the PR dept/CEO/you know it or not. Ask the backroom guys or netcraft. For a non-Fortune-500 non-BSD server, can you really name a superior solution?
Re:Not quite ready (Score:5, Insightful)
The longer and harder you think, the more time gets wasted. You lose nothing when givng Linux a try.
I don't think I could recommend it to Sally Secretary quite yet.
How did your Sally Secretary learn to use Windows and Office? Osmosis? I doubt it. Trining isn't a factor for normal users.
In Gnome, for example, I occasionally get a dialog box that says " occurred. For more information, click on the help button." Naturally there is no help button.
In MS Office, Sally frequently gets "It appears you are typing a letter" message. Does she know how to turn it off? Is there a toll free MS support number she can contact?
What about " Program performed illegal operation. Instruction could not be Read" messgaes? Those pop-ups? Those BSODs? Does BSOD come with a Help button?
Please.. think before you troll.
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Re:Not quite ready (Score:5, Funny)
Huh, what do you expect from someone whose username is "egg troll", and URL is "http://www.microsoft.com" ? ;-D
Re:Not quite ready (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I mean it's only a Government Department. They do absolutely nothing important.
Who gives a toss that all their systems are built around MS? Screw feasibility studies, let's just roll Linux out! No long and hard thinking required!
I mean, come on!
-- james
Sally Secretary was using Unix ... (Score:3, Funny)
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!
Bill Gates was using Unix ... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not quite ready (Score:5, Insightful)
The longer and harder you think, the more time gets wasted. You lose nothing when givng Linux a try.
oh? you loose hundreds of hours in training, across the org.
How did your Sally Secretary learn to use Windows and Office? Osmosis? I doubt it. Trining[sic] isn't a factor for normal users.
actually, she learned it thanks to a consistent graphical metaphor and standards that work across apps. let's not forget the much simpler fat file tree and 3 digit extension and the lack of 10 different directories to control 8 different aspects of an installed app. You may scoff, after all, this unix-y stuff is familiar to you. The windows environment is far simpler to grasp and always the same. that is to stay, the environment is stable, even if some of the apps aren't. *nixes are wildly varient. just take the switch from netscape's "Alt-C" for copy to Moz's "Ctrl-C" for copy, and you'll have your proof of what I'm saying.
In Gnome, for example, I occasionally get a dialog box that says " occurred. For more information, click on the help button." Naturally there is no help button.
In MS Office, Sally frequently gets "It appears you are typing a letter" message. Does she know how to turn it off? Is there a toll free MS support number she can contact?
wtf? she can ignore the clip. r-click on it and choose hide assistant. couldn't be simpler.
What about " Program performed illegal operation. Instruction could not be Read" messgaes[sic]? Those pop-ups? Those BSODs? Does BSOD come with a Help button?
fwiw, BSODs haven't been a problem for years. and when they were, 99% of the time it was the result of 3rd party developers stomping all over the memory space of a kernel that was working to support 20+ years of legacy apps and hardware. And professionals all over the world understand this.
Please.. think before you troll.
Maybe you should stop and think before you advocate with thoughtless zealotry. You are hardly going to accomplish anything with foolish knee-jerking, nor are you contributing to the serious discussion of these matters by echoing the party-line. How are we ever going to shake the MSFT yoke with shallow stick shaking like this?
Re:Not quite ready (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you ever watched Sally Secretary work? Sure she knows where the editing commands she uses in MS Word are, but ask her to execute similar commands in, say, Photoshop. She'll be lost.
let's not forget the much simpler fat file tree and 3 digit extension and the lack of 10 different directories to control 8 different aspects of an installed app.
Actually, let's forget them. They're irrelevant to Sally. All
Re:Not quite ready (Score:5, Funny)
It appears you are posting to Slashdot. Would you like to:
Re:Not quite ready (Score:4, Insightful)
Since you like to throw around wild claims maybe you can show me just one desktop-centric "thing" that isn't graphical in SuSE but is in Windows.
...or Mandrake... or Debian... or... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not quite ready (Score:4, Insightful)
By easy to use GUI you surely mean stuff like clippy, that nobody can use, or having a recycle bin that is poorly defined and isn't expected ( compare to the Mac where it is a main feature of the finder ). I am unable to use Windows without Cygwin installed, cimply because there is no way to GUIify many tasks ( like "mv *My Band*.mp3 My\ band/" ) because, face it, it would end up being a dialog box that would require a crude regexp, and would be really bulky at the end of the day.
I find that people are moving back to the command-line because they know that it is not going to have weird errors or freeze up on them.
OTOH, I would like for you to use Konq and tell me that it does not have enough functionality for doing everything graphically. I think that it does a better job than windows, since it offers so much more, and much better done, with coller themes that don't make you buy shit.
Re:Not quite ready (Score:3, Informative)
Firstly, this is trivial to "GUIfy" and Windows has done since at least Windows 95 (MacOS even earlier). The simple "find file" dialog will suffice and even without full regular expressions is capable of handling 99.9% of searches
Specifics please? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not quite ready (Score:5, Insightful)
Or fixed it!
Gnome and the rest of the open source apps are *really* nice now. Both my parents use linux now(and like it better). Neither of them are very heavy computer users but it seems to have worked better for them.
No spyware, system crashes, viruses, less spam, less advertising. Overall I think that improves productivity.
Of course I tailored each of their systems to them. Gave them assistance for a few days. But I did that for windows anyway(and spent longer at it).
Apps like email, web browsing, office stuff are *very* similar to windows programs.
Custom applications designed poorly(dependant on a single platform) are the main things holding people back. Many custom programs can be filled with open source programs.
Wine, win4lin, and vmware can be used in the transition to linux.
Have fun!
Re:Not quite ready (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of my users can barely use Windows anyway - any administration tasks are the responsibility of the IT people - which is no harder in Linux/BSD/etc than in Windows - often easier.
There are open standards to support most of a businesses needs (LaTex (Klyx, etc)), HTML, Postgresql, Mozilla, etc.
Any custom applications will need to be written by someone paid for by the government anyway - why not base them on an open platform?
Granted, its slightly more difficult (thought by no means impossible) to accomplish all this as a small business (you have to interact with the rest of the world - deal with word documents, etc), but a government is big enough to say "either send us stuff in compatible format, or don't deal with us".
Its a case of short term expense, for long term freedom of choice, and control over your standard operating enviornment.
smash.
Re:Not quite ready (Score:3, Insightful)
Assuming they "use Windows" as opposed to various applications, some of which may even go as far as to impose their own UI...
- any administration tasks are the responsibility of the IT people - which is no harder in Linux/BSD/etc than in Windows - often easier.
Especially when you can take away the ability of the end user or applications to be able to mess with all sorts of things best left alone.
Any custom applications will need to be written by someon
Re:Not quite ready (Score:3, Interesting)
So what do secretaries do when the get the BSOD or the "out of memory" screen? No one is asking secretaries to install Linux on their computers so I don't really see it as that big of a deal. As long as there is an icon on the desktop for t
What about the trade gap? (Score:5, Insightful)
USA gets less money
Australian unemployement goes down.
Whats wrong with OSS for sally?
Re:Not quite ready (Score:3, Insightful)
Much more important is legacy application support. If your main database only has Windows clients then you're mostly stuck unless you want to put a lot of time into testing it with VMware, or whatever.
Re:Not quite ready (Score:3, Informative)
Many/most government employees are "process workers"; people who use a very small number of programs (e.g. a Web browser) to perform largely repetitive tasks. There's very little knowledge or IT training these people need to do their jobs; wha
Re:Not quite ready? Of course it is. (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet throughout this history, we've somehow managed to organize large nation states and watch empires nearly conquer entire hemispheres without spending millions of dollars on bloated software.
There is an important lesson here. Despite the clamor on this discussion board, it is not "Linux r0x0rs!". It is that people often come up with good tools for specific tasks to control the environment -- this (and language of course) is our defining characteristic. Most secretaries use windows PCs so they can run MS-Word. That's a whole lot of licensing fees to pay to MSFT for what is essentially a glorified typewriter.
So to get to my point... Before you bash unices as being too hard for Sally Secretary to use, consider this. Create a distro that emulates a typewriter exactly. No command prompt, no shell, no KDE, no Mozilla, no translucent alpha blended windowing system. Just a typewriter. And it's free, and you can run it easily on a $200 computer.
Start there and then add whatever else you need. Don't start with a general purpose computing platform and complain that it's too hard to use. Of course it's too hard. This whole mentality of using a "desktop environment" is one of the worst crutches the computing industry has been hobbled with. Somehow the concepts of "BIOS" and "DOS" evolved from a set of useful low-level I/O routines into a horribly bloated general purpose machine with so many points of failure, that we're often spending more money now on IT and training than on the machines and the people who actually use them!
(BTW don't take this as a MSFT bash. I feel as strongly about Apple's overly general approach to computing, though at least their momentum seems to be toward a more controlled environment. And all the people working on Linux window managers and trying to make their Linux machines have a "START" button and "My Computer"... Jesus, it makes me sick...)
Re:Not quite ready? Of course it is. (Score:4, Interesting)
This was a unix-alike system (although the OS was *proprietary*). Users used terminals/terminal-emulators.
It had a appliction for writing letters about the patients. This application was only used by secretaries. The firm that made it also had a plugin for MSword. Using this plugin users didn't need to use the terminal-based application, but they could write their letters in Word, fill in some database form-fields and send it over to the system.
So the users could choose between:
- terminal-based word-processor
and
- MS-Word-with-plugin.
Our experiences were:
- New end/or temporary staff liked to use Word, since everyone knows word so training-time is shorter (and thus you get more productive hours from those people that only stay for a week).
- Experienced staff *liked* and *chose* to use the terminal-based version. Reasons: it was more responsive, less error-prone, no need to use the mouse (switching left hand keys->mouse->keys->mouse->....), more productivity (it took less time to initiate a new letter, to save it).
Secretaries and non-IT-skilled staff have for long been able to use all kinds of IT-systems (with proper training). I was surprised to see that they sometimes actually chose to use a unix-alike when there was also Word. So here you have it: what counts in the long run is functionality. Does the application do what you want from it, does it do it effectively, efficiently and reliably? GIU is a plus, but no more than that.
MrPrince.
Re:Not quite ready? Of course it is. (Score:4, Interesting)
I agreed with most of your post, but I'm, going to have to complain about this bit.
I think OS's should have even more time spent on making better GUI's, with as much written language removed from it as possible. Humans have fantastic abilities to process pure images (i.e. pure graphical UI's); it's when humans have to deal with written language (i.e. Text only UI) that you get hobbled.
I for one, would not be in the Job I am in, if it had not been for desktop GUI's. I'm Dyslexic, and as a result I had horrible troubles learning and using command line only interfaces. You see, my reading was not very good back then, I had to learn how to speed-read because my brain processes language in a completely different way to the average person. As for spelling, ha, try using a command line if you can't spell. Not only that, I can't even see most of my mistakes, even after going over a statement several times.
I was not really into computers till I got my hands on Apples and later Macs in school. Once I learned the concepts of basic computing from using desktop GUI's (which relied on my image processing skills, instead of my non-existent language skills) I was able to carry those skills over to command line interfaces. I'd prolly be Anti-Computer still if I had not been able to learn on a Desktop GUI.
It's not just people with "learning disabilities". I can sit down at a PC running Windows, or a Mac running OS X in a Spanish/French/Greek/Japanese Internet café, without being able to speak or read a word of any of those languages, and I can still surf the net.
I think a pure GUI, void of any written language is the Holy Grail of computing as far as I'm concerned. It would not matter what your native language was, you would be able sot sit down, and use the computer.
(For the record, I'm not "stuck with GUI's, I was able to become very proficient with command line interfaces in the end. I used BBS before the Internet was even available, and the first time I logged into the Internet was on a Commodore 64. And yes, I had to spell check this post)
Re:Not quite ready (Score:3, Interesting)
If it saves them money, then perhaps governments ought to consider doing some of the polishing themselves and actually have something to show for the tax dollars spent. Of c
Re:Not quite ready (Score:3, Interesting)
It's funny that the Linux-using "Linux not ready for desktop" crowd are almost exclusively Gnome users.
Re:Not quite ready-Freedom of Budget Act. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not quite ready-Freedom of Budget Act. (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
That doesn't always help (Score:4, Informative)
You know... (Score:5, Funny)
Do you really think you can embarrass them by their choice of Operating System?
Re:You know... (Score:4, Insightful)
And, since when have modern governments ever been embarassed about wasting money? Doesn't happen very often. At least, not in the US.
Good idea from the democrats (Score:2)
Re:Good idea from the democrats (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that I'm the biggest MS supporter, but you want a few good reasons why they shouldn't just roll on out a new system:
1. Retraining costs. For an entire Government
2. Required software doesn't exist, or isn't as functional as under MS-platforms. Exchange is the biggest kicker - there are free alternatives, but not much matches the functionality. It is de facto.
3. Support staff. You've got an entire IS infrastructure built around supporting the platform. I agree, the tail should not wag the dog, but the cost of retraining these guys to become necessarily savvy with Linux may even be more than point 1.
4. MS has a support infrastructure that is much better suited to helping large organisations meet their IS roles than any Linux based organisation, especially here in Australia.
These are just off the top of my head. Like I said, standard slashdot disclaimer - I'm hardly an MS sympathiser - but with the en masse discounts MS offers big organisations like Governments, and the potential pitfalls that changing to Linux could involve, I would want the Government to be very wary of wandering down this path. I especially agree with the "mandatory" selection of an OS - as always, it should be best tool for the job.
-- james
Wrong strategy?? (Score:4, Interesting)
The question to ask is:
How much money does Microsoft spend on each minister. That would be truly embarassing, specially in the US.
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Re:Wrong strategy?? (Score:3, Flamebait)
Do you see US politicians being embarrased about being bought by Big Corp? I don't. Quite the opposite, actually. The entire cabinet is full of old-boy club members handing out favors to each other. And nobody cares.
Huh? (Score:3, Funny)
affirmative action: "an active effort to improve the employment or educational opportunities of members of minority groups and women"
That's a bad thing?
Re:Huh? (Score:2)
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
affirmative action: descrimination against an individual based on his/her race, creed, sex etc.
how "affirmative" affirmative action is is based on whether you are descriminated against or not. Consider this, university admissions, you have a rich blond hair blue eyed hispanic and a poor asian kid, affirmative action helps the hispanic kid.
Being asian, i wouldnt like that too much. descrimination is bad in any way, shape or form.
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Troll)
As some US President said (Truman?), this is like freeing the slaves from their leg irons and then expecting them to have a fair chance of winning a 100 metre sprint.
'Discrimination' may well have value in righting wrongs.
Alternatively, we could consider the statistics. A vastly disproportionate number of whites get into top universities compared to other races. Either you contend:
- (a) there is some natural genetic reason whites do better (i.e. eugenics
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
The irony wasn't lost (Score:2)
Reasoning? (Score:2, Insightful)
1) Some rinky-dink Open Source programs are just as buggy as their closed source couterparts. Having just been a TA for the last little while, I know some of the horrible coders who will be unleashing their pet projects anytime now.
2) Some closed source applications do a pretty decent job and ar
I can't help getting the feeling... (Score:5, Insightful)
Usually you don't find government adopting new tech earlier than private enterprise, but with Linux it seems to be working the other way (or at least both ways). And I'd say that a major reason for that is anti US sentiment.
Re:I can't help getting the feeling... (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm a firm believer in the best tool for the job - open source or not, so I don't think open source software should be used for its own sake. However, I could imagine many governments (or companies) would like to have some perceived control of their own technical destiny.
Open source is a simple way to reduce relianc
Re:I can't help getting the feeling... (Score:4, Interesting)
You nailed it! Just think at the resentment to H1Bs and the French in the US. Imagine Microsoft and Sun were French companies. Would the US think long and hard, and ponder over Gartner reports before jumping to Linux?
Jacques Chirac donating a few billions to unemployed Americans 'cos they lost their jobs to French giant Microsoft! Yeah.. now I can see resentment from both sides.
-
Re:I can't help getting the feeling... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's more about independence than anti-US attitude. In the current world independence and anti-US attitude have something in common but in the end, they're two very different things.
One example is the city of Munich that switched from an American vendor (Microsoft) to another American vendor (IBM). The difference is that the former makes the city dependant on a single foreign company while the latter simply provides good service for an open platform. Choosing an American vendor doesn't seem to raise many concerns but depending on one American vendor does.
Re:I can't help getting the feeling... (Score:3, Interesting)
Munich changed from a US vendor with a German support organization (Microsoft Corp. and Microsoft GmbH) to a German vendor with a German support organization (SuSE and IBM Deutschland GmbH). Since support and education is a very important piece of the Munich cake, this piece of business was in local German hands already. The importance of technical independence is not seen as important as some /. readers would like to see it. I
Re:I can't help getting the feeling... (Score:4, Insightful)
It should, but for different reasons. In the case of the rest of the world, they would like to keep money in the country.
For the US, they should care about having a diversified IT sector. The US government is a large enough client that it could choose three or four software suites, and insist that they play nicely together. I mean, do the government only buy cars from one manufacturer?
Actually I think it would (Score:3, Insightful)
So I think if you started pointing out how much money each level of government spends on MS when there are alternatives to paying a huge corporation outrageous sums, especially now with budgets getting tighter for local governments across the country - well, I think you could make quite an inroad.
i'd rather... (Score:3, Insightful)
computers? thats a small minority of what the government spends money on, i'd like to see how much money goes to other stuff... corporate welfare perhapse?
Re:i'd rather... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.budget.gov.au/ [budget.gov.au]
and here:
http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/estimates/index.htm [aph.gov.au]
I mean, honestly, who doesn't know that governments produce "Budgets" ?!?!?
Two sites... (Score:5, Interesting)
Affirmative action? (Score:2)
strikes me as contradictory and/or distracting to the intent of the query:
It seems that budgetary disclosure would be of benefit to everyone
Re:Affirmative action? (Score:2)
There are two things here. One is an attempt to embarrass the government by making them state on the record how much they spend on MS software. The other is a push for some sort of law relating to OSS and government procurement, possibly including provisions to give preference to OSS, all other things being equal. So, there is criticism from the conservative side of politics that such a law should not include preference for OSS as this would be unfair to other companies such as MS.
Kapish?
Pauline Hanson (Score:2, Funny)
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
She's currently in court for electoral fraud. (Score:2)
The liberal party is right.... (Score:5, Insightful)
End of the day governements, like all organisations need to use the right product for the right job. It is not a bad idea for government departments to have to investigate open source solutions however to make them mandatory is madness.
Huge MS license spend... (Score:5, Insightful)
The point of this exercise is to look at how much the Australian government spends on Microsoft licenses (at a guess, multiple tens of millions of dollars annually), and ask whether it would be a better use of those funds to enhance open source software so that it meets government requirements. Tens of millions of dollars annually employs a lot of people...
Re:The liberal party is right.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Open source shouldn't be mandatory but open formats should be and that means MS office isn't the best tool for the job.
Why do they call it "embarassing"??? (Score:2)
The oppression industry is quite good at playing the name game. Look at how entrenched "piracy" has become.
Wasting Money??? (Score:3, Interesting)
I no it is a futile point to stress, but spending money on software is not necessarily a waste of money. Software developers, IT staff, network technicians, Linux gurus all look to the layman like a big fat waste of money.
The problem isn't that the Australian government is spending money on computers and software, but that the world's richest and one of the most politically powerful man on the earth has the government in a vice with its OS and other monopolies.
There is a good argument that it would be better for Australia to go the OSS route. It would help encourage the local development of software, etc.. The problem is not that people working on or developing software get paid.
There is a second extremely powerful implied argument in the article in that people don't really know how much MS gets from the government. If the government tallied up their bill, they would be shocked. As it stands, MS is able to hide its take in the cost of hardware, or other parts of the ledger.
Re:Wasting Money??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bingo. Witness the Munich descision - it wasn't a move based on saving $ now, it was a strategic move to free themselves from a single-source vendor, who could potentially hold thier IT infrestructure hostage in some way, shape or form. What is really damaging to MS is the fact that this is a good, long term business decision that the astute businessman will recognize as such.
As more knowlegeable and informed people clue in to just how dependant they are on Microsoft (if they fall out of Microsofts good graces they're likley to have a rather expensive software audit on thier hands) they'll go for alternatives just to make sure they're in control of thier own software (and therefore business) from then on. Licensing 6.0 tipped Microsofts' hand way too much - it showed people that MS has lost a lot of respect for thier customers. That being the case, the end is inevitable. One year, 2 years, 5 years - doesn't matter. Zero-choice software is on it's way out, Freedom-of-choice software is on it's way in.
Soko
This is not executed very well (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, I'm no Microsoft supporter, but wouldn't it be much better for government officials to talk in more generalized terms? Don't attack Microsoft, attack the whole idea of a cash-strapped government using software that requires exorbitant licensing fees and overly restrictive licenses. Why not attack Oracle? Or Peoplesoft? They are just as bad as Microsoft is, just not quite as rich.
As far as mandating open source software across the board, that's a bad idea as well. What if there is no suitable open source project for the task at hand? Should the government fund its own open source project to create one? Sort of goes against the whole idea of saving money and decreasing beuracracy. Forcing the government to limit itself to software produced through one particular business model over another is pretty silly, IMO.
Odd behaviours coming from governments (Score:3, Insightful)
But
For certain organizations, like governments, there are 2 issues that should overshadow all the other : (1) the issue of governmental independance from third party vendors and other countries, and (2) the issue of information integrity and security for agencies such as secret services.
Just imagine you're in a position of power in a (non US) government, and you know nothing about computers, and someone tells you you have a choice between software that you can have total control over that's free (as in speech), or a piece of software from a notoriously greedy US vendor that has a notoriously shitty track record for computer security, what would you do ? I don't know for you, but it wouldn't cross my mind one second to use the latter. I'd rather be sure my country's computers can be totally independant from any country or vendor, in peace or war time, even if that may mean paying more for auditing the entire free software suites I use, or adapt it to the country's needs. The investment is a one-off then the country is free. Cases where Microsoft or other proprietary vendors would be chosen over free software should be kept to the strictest minimum, when no other alternatives are available.
All the above is valid for the US too : of course, they don't run the risk of one day being at war with themselves and suffering from embargoes, but they still have the situation where a public organization is at the mercy of a private one for a critical part of its operating resources. And just imagine, if some country drops a bomb on Redmond (N.K. comes to mind), how long do you think the US could continue functioning ? 6 months, 1 year ? Isn't odd that the country that created ARPANET to be resilient to anything that could happen in the country runs it with computers that have software installed from one sole vendor ?
So this is what I don't understand : how come governments even ask themselves what the right choice is in the matter ?
Re:Odd behaviours coming from governments (Score:4, Insightful)
You're on the right track. It seems that everybody is missing the most important point, that of the "open" in open source software, which is the most important thing for Government use. Although cost should be an issue, it is not nearly as important as openness. The government is around to serve the people, and must make it's "output" must remain free, as in freedom, to all.
The government's "outputs" are of course things like laws and regulations, research, census statistics, environment and geological surveys, budgets, and so on. All of those things should be made available to the public who pay for it without restrictions. And that means that all the document formats used should not be beholden to copyright and patent ridden proprietary corporate software.
Just consider the National Archives [nara.gov], which publishes the Federal Register (the offical US publication which announces regulations and so forth. They have long understood that freedom concept and make all these regulations available as PDF and text, as well as their traditional paper-printed forms. There are no MS Word documents there, no encrypted eBooks. It is important that the public have free access to those publications, and that they remain perfectly readable 20 years from now (long after old Word versions become unreadable by the newer versions). Also it is important that the public be able to trust that what they are reading is authentic. Can I really trust Word to not recognize that when I'm reading a regulation on software piracy it silently inserts an extra little Microsoft sentence? Well, actually MS is not that evil, but the point is that I have no way to really know, the Word format is binary and proprietary and I can't verify that Word is displaying the correct output as I can't examine it's source or recompile it from source.
Governments should adopt OSS not for it's potential price benifits, but philosophically because it is open.
Re:Odd behaviours coming from governments (Score:3, Insightful)
would you choose a shitty car that broke all the fucking time and didn't use a normal steering wheel, a standard gear lever, or a wheel-mounted stalk for a turn indicator, but you were provided with the wiring diagrams and a box of cheap wrenches ?
-OR-
A toyota.
Which would your parents choose ? Which would a politician choose ? Remember, the goal here is to drive. Not to fuck about with cars.
Here's another question to consider:
"Which is worse - giving mon
Open-source should not be legislated (Score:4, Insightful)
However, I'm also of the firm opinion that, at least for government documents, the format of the data should be, by law, an open format. That is, a format that is completely and openly described, and with an open-source viewer (as a reference implementation).
Furthermore, the software products that government workers use should, by default, save in the open format, without loss of functionality. In other words, "Save As..." doesn't cut the mustard.
Once that is in place, applications will be able to play on a more level playing ground. Furthermore, there won't be the risk of documents being lost because there is no longer any software available that can read them.
Embarrassing? Hardly (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact remains that the Federal Government won't be embarrassed at the large (wasteful?) sums of money it spends on IT infrastructure because it does not listen to the IT industry.
Even when the Australian IT Minister (Richard Luddite [theregister.co.uk] Alston) spent 4 million dollars [whirlpool.net.au] on his website, the uproar was loud in the IT sector, but nonexistent elsewhere.
...and don't get me started on the shitful state of broadband in this country.
It's the File Formats that Matter (Score:4, Interesting)
It's much more difficult to argue against a law along the lines of "all Government information must be stored in an ISO approved format."
TCO (Score:3, Informative)
In late 2002 the Danish Board of Technology, an independent government body advising the parliament on matters of technology, published a report [tekno.dk] examining the applicability of Open Source in government. The report estimated that the public sector could save several billion Danish kroner (one Danish krone is approximately 0.15 dollars) per year by switching to Open Source software - which is a lot in a small country like Denmark. The figure caught a lot of average goverment IT managers by surprise and consequently generated a lot of discussion as to the accuracy of the numbers and methodology used in the report but I think the general consensus now is that the only way to find out for sure is to give it a try.
Open standards - not open source... (Score:5, Insightful)
But requiring files to be in a particular format, an open format, at least gives open source software a chance. If not now, then in the future. Microsoft is famous for trying to lock users into their software and this would prevent that.
So what I say is require standards, and use the best software for the job.
Other ways to be embarrassed. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it more likely though that the US will be embarrassed in a different way. As poorer countries in the world begin to computerize, and network themselves, there is a good chance they will rely on Open Source solutions to get started. India, and Brazil, notably have significant Linux user bases already. Eventually there will be some interesting comparisons I bet about how this has had an impact, not only on their cost of doing business, but the overall impact on computer literacy as well.
Watch someone who has NEVER used a computer use Windows for the first time. It's not a pretty sight. Windows is "intuitive" only after you have been using it for a year or so. The fact that most Windows programs use the same GUI elements, the same dropdown command set etc, makes each new program a bit easier to figure out than the previous ones. A large percentage of these new users will only learn the bare minimum to get by, and for them, it is to be expected that they will never want anything about that desktop to change.
A smaller percentage, but still a significant number of new users will want to learn more, such people in a Linux/Unix environment are instantly rewarded by how much stuff there is out there. They may shoot themselves in the foot a few times, but eventually these will be power users. Such a person, even without root access can do an order of magnitude more things on their own than a similarly motivated Windows user. I think this difference in user base will show up in subtle ways that will cause both business and governments in the US to wonder why we have been short changing ourselves.
Too bad they can't figure it out sooner.
Instead of embarrasing gov'ts to adopt open source (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Only logical argument? (Score:3, Interesting)
They don't need any more sysadmins. Just sysadmins who know Linux. To Windows sysadmins, sure, Linux looks difficult to use. If you already know it, it's a fairly logical system. Plus, it's easier to maintain more Linux systems per sysadmin than Windows systems because you aren't forced to use a GUI for everything.
But will they still save money in the end--even after they have spent $$$ to re-train their employees on Linux?
I kno
Liberal Party = Arch Conservatives (Score:5, Informative)
The Liberal Party in Australia has morphed over the decades into something like your Republican Party only more right wing.
The Labour Party is usually considered by the Libs as a bunch a commies ... and yet they also have right wing tendencies (sometimes very).
The Democrats are made of left wing refugees from the Liberal Party and right wing refugees from the Labour Party. Sort of. Though I cried when they got rid of their leader Natasha Stott-Despoja ... a hot chick.
Re:Liberal Party = Arch Conservatives (Score:4, Interesting)
They are very, very right wing.
Please ignore the drivel posted above (Score:5, Informative)
Their ideology in brief:
- pro business, especially bigger business
- anti welfare
- anti affirmative action
- pro US, pro US foreign policy
- pro invasions of civil liberties in the name of defence against 'terror'
- terrible on the environment
- like to be divisive (known as 'wedge politics')
- HATE labour movements, unions, (left) student movements etc.
- anti immigration
- anti government regulation/intervention, preferring the 'free' market to run itself
They are very firmly on the right of politics. Despite the idiotic rantings of other posters, their name is extremely misleading, even to some Australians. In the last few years they have lurched sharply right, especially in the wake of September 11.
Despite what you may be told, they are *nothing* like the Libertarians. They want a strong, omniscient federal government and are constantly clashing with the judiciary, civil rights groups and minorities over their (ab)use of power. Their Attorney General also makes Joseph Goebbels look soft on terrorism.
Re:The Democrats (Score:3, Insightful)
True what you say, even though people are modding you down - I feel the Democrats will be no more after the next election. Their votes will no doubt go to the Greens, though.
Re:High tech affirmative action....?! (Score:3, Informative)
So, I'm sad to say, he isn't swedish (which I am), but he talks swedish.
Re:Time spent rebooting? Time spent devirussing? (Score:3, Informative)
Three hours ago. I was browsing the web with malice aforethought and had three PuTTY sessions open as well. 256MB of RAM, XP Professional.
For most things, exactly what I would charge for setting up the equivalent MS-Windows (XP|200[03]) box. Anything fancy goes to an hourly rate and MS-Windows rapidly racks up the dollars on those terms.