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.'"
I'd like to see some OSS hurdles addressed... (Score:4, Insightful)
Find an OSS replacement that can do what Active Directory, BitLocker, and Exchange can do, and a lot of companies would jump to it.
Bitlocker != loopback mounted encryption or TrueCrypt. BitLocker has two advantages over standard FDE systems. First, since it uses a TPM chip, it requires no passwords or supervised access at boot time (unless configured explictly to do so). This allows people to log onto a machine as a user, but have no access to other user's items, even if they pull out a recovery CD and reboot the machine. The second BitLocker advantage is that it detects tampering. With existing FDE systems, one can replace binaries with keyloggers, and nobody would notice. BitLocker, the TPM would notice a different value and not return a decryption key.
And TrouSers or tboot is a nice proof of concept, but nowhere near a workable solution that can be used.
Exchange forces companies to use AD, and once a company has an AD infrastructure, there is no point in using OpenLDAP or another directory structure.
It probably wouldn't be a bad thing... (Score:2, Insightful)
To point out to the feds that if one department actually sponsors the writing of a piece of code, by virtue of it being open source, other branches of the government would be able to take advantage of it in some way. What government is really looking for is platforms to write end to end systems on.
But there is a problem. Government is not about doing a job efficiently, for either political party. It is about spreading the wealth around and bringing bucks to your home state. It's not really wrong, its just how democracy actually is. Republicans say they are against this, but, man, every year the US Senate bought another LPD because they were made in Trent Lotts home state, until now the USA has like almost 20 little aircraft carriers about the same size as the 2 the British operate, and that's on top of its nimitzs. And George W Bush certainly kept Johnson Space Center in Texas rolling...
Now if Microsoft were actually politically smart, they would put federal systems development centers in the northeast. Washington state just isn't well, important enough politically for government work...
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just what Washington Needs... (Score:3, Insightful)
Only they won't have any money . . .
Well a quick scan of revenues on Wikipedia puts the named corporations' annual revenues last year at over USD24 Billion. Small change to you no doubt but probably enough to bend an ear or two in Washington DC.
Re:I'd like to see some OSS hurdles addressed... (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod parent up.
These are certainly areas that need improvement, and if garnering government adoption is a goal, they should be addresses. It's not that there are no open source solutions to these problems, it's that they are not yet mature (as is the case with TrouSers and Samba 4) or that they are not as fully integrated. More importantly, the solutions that are available don't have a massive marketing machine behind them.
Just about everything that you can do with closed source software, you can do with open source. The problems are largely around usability and marketing. PHB's go with the "politically safe" choices, government PHB's even more so.
Re:Careful. (Score:2, Insightful)
Financial collapse happened because capitalism doesn't work, not because we had too much regulation.
Correction, it happened precisely because capitalism works. The problem is that capitalism doesn't care about greed, or really any other human condition. That's why we had regulations, but I think that the regulations were relaxed in favor of a self governing policy. The problem is that when you have greedy bastards running the show, they do very little self governing.
Nice try, though.
Re:Careful. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Careful. (Score:4, Insightful)
The Republicans do not think the markets were not free enough to prevent collapse.
They think that they can get more power and money for themselves by promising a freer market.
Just like the Democrats think they can get more power and money for themselves by promising more regulation.
They divided the population neatly in two parts and picked their positions to get more power and money.
Voters must be the dumbest motherfuckers on Earth to think that the major parties have the interests of the people in mind.
Re:It probably wouldn't be a bad thing... (Score:3, Insightful)
until now the USA has like almost 20 little aircraft carriers about the same size as the 2 the British operate
Note: an LPD has an entirely different mission from a carrier. The Nimitz etc. is designed to transport air power anywhere in the world. LPDs and other similar classes are basically troop transports. If you need to provide air superiority, an LPD would be nearly worthless as they don't really carry anything more offensive than a few Harriers. If you need to deliver a few thousand Marines to a beach somewhere, a carrier would be nearly worthless as they're not rigged for transporting that many passengers or hosting the landing craft to put them on the beach.
Not that I don't agree with you about everything else - just nitpicking.
Re:FOSS will have to change to be more competitive (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd bet that if the government wanted 10 years of support for 8.04 and was willing to pay for it, Canonical would jump at the chance. Since each copy is still free, and since any problems and fixes that are discovered can be freely shared among the government's IT staff, it would probably still be much cheaper.
Re:No support (Score:3, Insightful)
You were trying to sell him on the software, he wanted to be sold on the company. Don't say there are distros. Say this one company has a product, and it supports that product like any other company would. You have benefits with open source that you don't with closed, and you can pitch that all you want. Usually when someone doesn't see something that's obvious it's because you aren't presenting it in a way they understand.
Re:It probably wouldn't be a bad thing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if you get the Wasp and an LPD mixed up, my same comment still applies - neither an LPD or an LHD is a CV. Three different ships, three different missions. (Though the missions of the LPD and the LHD are related.)
Which works so long as your opponent similarly limits himself to a small number of low performance aircraft. If you face an opponent who doesn't... You're in deep, deep shit.
Which worked because the Argentinean's were borderline incompetent, and operating at the extreme edge of their range. A very specific set of circumstances and one very, very, dangerous to generalize from.