The Economist on Open Source in Government 331
locarecords.com writes "The Economist has an excellent article about Microsoft attempting to undermine the Open Source and Free Software movements. Particularly interesting are the issues relating to proprietary software and government and how other countries are mandating free software in government software projects."
Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Open the document formats (Score:4, Informative)
I'm glad that Opera, Mozilla...etc,etc,etc and Apache server kept Microsoft from controlling the HTML standards completely!!
Rubbish (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, there are deficiencies. It doesn't have a database or email/calendar programme. I'm not sure what I would use for the former but I know they are debating it in their mailing lists. For email/calendar there is Mozilla. That's not perfect either, but it's the only browser I use.
I recently gave a copy to a nurse at work who wanted MS office but was not going to pay that sort of price. I installed OOO on her laptop and she took it home. The only verbal assistance I gave was a reminder to save things to
I asked how it was going after a couple of weeks. The reply was "it just works".
While this, here in Brazil... (Score:4, Informative)
Windows to Linux 80% of all computers in state institutions and state-owned
businesses, informed the daily newspaper "Valor". This will be a gradual
migration, that will begin with a pilot project in one ministry and which will
be completed over a period of three years, according to official sources cited
by the financial daily.
The goal of the migration is to save money by finding alternatives to
expensive proprietary licenses. Highlighting the gradual phase-in approach
that the Brazilian government has adopted, Sergio Amadeu de Silveira, the
president of the National Institute of Information Technology, stated that "We
are not just going to do a hasty migration". He proceeded to say that "our
main concern is the security and the trust of our citizens. The biggest
resistance to any change comes from the existing cultural inertia".
The government, De Silveira explained, created two weeks ago the "Chamber for
the Implementation of Software Libre" to pave the way for the upcoming
migration.
A small part of the 2,095 million reals (about USD $700 million) that the
Brazilian government budgeted for information technology spending goes to
Microsoft, owner of the Windows OS. The government's decision to adopt Linux,
according to De Silveira, will boost the popularity of the operating system
among businesses and consumers. Moreover, it will foster the production of
local software and "democratize access to knowledge", said De Silveira.
Ahem, Microsoft is NOT Free Market !!! (Score:3, Informative)
Well now we are entering into the information age, and copyrights are looking far more like an untenable and eternally unenforcable restriction every day and less like a property right every day. They are not about property, commerce, freedom, or markets - but controll, and so is Microsoft and the other's like them such as the RIAA who have held themselves accountable to the same forces.
Re:Open the document formats (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Well this is news. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Economy 101: (Score:5, Informative)
Re:While this, here in Brazil... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That was a pretty honest article (Score:2, Informative)
The Economist has been guardedly positive about open source for quite a while now. They advocated the anti-trust suit against Microsoft and they were covering Linux with a positive spin even back then. And every few weeks I see a big IBM ad on the back cover with Linux in big, bold letters. I'd say they are as big a booster of open source software as you will find in the non-tech oriented press and in this they have been consistently ahead of the trend. Now it seems that they have an open source related article every week or two.