New Coalition To Promote OSS To Feds 99
LinuxScribe writes "Red Hat, Mozilla, Novell, Oracle, and Sun are among the 50-plus member Open Source for America coalition that will be officially announced today by Tim O'Reilly at OSCON. The OSA will be a strong advocate for free and open source software, and plans to boost US Federal government support and adoption of FOSS. From their website: 'The mission of OSA is to educate decision makers in the US Federal government about the advantages of using free and open source software; to encourage the Federal agencies to give equal priority to procuring free and open source software in all of their procurement decisions; and generally provide an effective voice to the US Federal government on behalf of the open source software community, private industry, academia, and other non-profits.'"
Re:I'd like to see some OSS hurdles addressed... (Score:1, Informative)
>Find an OSS replacement that can do what Active Directory, BitLocker, and Exchange can do, and a lot of companies would jump to it.
Samba 4 can do what Active Directory can do.
OpenChange can do what Exchange can do.
Alfresco can do what Sharepoint can do.
I have never heard of any company using BitLocker.
Re:I'd like to see some OSS hurdles addressed... (Score:4, Informative)
OpenChange, according to their website, doesn't seem to be an actual solution but more of an implementation of the MAPI protocols in library format. And they also are alpha, with a production class release 'to be announced'.
Alfresco looks good, but lacks integration with any office product (OpenOffice.Org or Microsoft Office), and as such requires a lot of manual work when collaborating on documents held in it.
I'm not touting Microsoft here, but people need to stop googling for alternatives and then proudly holding them as alternatives to proven products in the market place. It decreases credibility when two out of three responses are not even touting *themselves* as production standard.
Re:It probably wouldn't be a bad thing... (Score:2, Informative)
The LPDs are not aircraft carriers nor do they resemble the British carriers, such as the Invincible class.
You were probably thinking of the Tarawa class LHAs and Wasp class LHDs, which do outwardly resemble the Invincible class carriers, however they also have a well deck for landing craft which the British ships do not.
The LHAs and LHDs are primarily designed for amphibious landing operations, their primary mission is to deliver a USMC battalion to shore and support the Marines in combat operations.
The British Invincible-class carriers are light aircraft carriers whose primary mission is to operate Sea Harrier fixed wing V/STOL aircraft and helicopters.
While the US ships operate the AV-8B ( the US version of the Harrier ), V-22 Ospreys and helicopters they are not light aircraft carriers.
The Tarawa class ships are almost twice as big ( about 38,900 tons ) as the British carriers (by displacement) and the Wasps ( about 40,500 tons ) have about twice the displacement of Invincible-class ( about 20,700 tons ).
The Nimitz class super carriers are entirely in a class of their own. The newest Nimitz class carriers displace more than 103,000 tons and can operate up to 90 fixed wing non-V/STOL aircraft ( vs. about 20 aircraft including Harriers and helicopters for the British carriers ).
Re:Careful. (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, Adam Smith warned against unregulated capitalism and the effects of wealth on political influence [typepad.com].