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Comments: 99 +- Linux: New Coalition To Promote OSS To Feds on Wednesday July 22 2009, @07:46AM
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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.'"
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Careful. (Score:5, Funny)
If you get the government too enthused about Free Software they may decide to "help" it.
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If you get the government too enthused about Free Software they may decide to "help" it.
Yeah, unlike industry, which always has all our best interests at heart....
Our best hope is to make sure that nobody uses Free/Libre Software. That way, there's guaranteed to be no bad influences. :)
(Frankly, I don't think SELinux is that bad a result; if more gov't help is along those lines, I think we'll do fine.)
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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.
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If every capitalist system eventually needs to be brought under control because of human conditions, isn't that kinda the same as capitalism never works? I mean, what you're saying is that it would work fine if people weren't involved. Capitalism is a method of humans interacting together, so if you take out the humans it isn't anything at all.
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Bullshit, what you call capitalism ain't. You set up a strawman of unrestricted freedom and then attempt to impress us by blowing it down.
The "free" in "free market" refers to freedom of entry and exit. It doesn't mean free to act like rapacious beast. The "free" in "free market" always required law and regulation to constrain people's behavior so that entry and exit remain free.
There was a rage among the psuedo-intellectuals in tenured positions (who discovered Marxism during the 60's) to claim that there
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Capitalism is a form of government, which is a societal regulatory system.
Capitalism is not a form of government--it is an economic system. The two may or may not be connected, but they're not the same thing.
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Greed corrupts; absolute greed corrupts absolutely. Welcome to capitalism, comrade.
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Actually, Adam Smith warned against unregulated capitalism and the effects of wealth on political influence [typepad.com].
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Which would by definition kinda not be capitalism after all right?
It doesn't matter if the "government" is really the government or not. If anyone's bossing the economy around, it's not capitalism.
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.
Parent
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Just what Washington Needs... (Score:2)
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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.
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Every agency right now is being asked to do more with less, or at least do the same with less. (even the DoD). When I first proposed a few pieces of FOSS a couple years ago (a PDF creator instead of Adobe product, Octave unless Matlab really needed, Paint.net vs. photoshop, etc.) I got the response "We don't do freeware here." As he said it I envisioned visions (yes, I know) of 3-1/2" floppies full of shareware and viruses being tossed about between friends 15 years ago. Promoting FOSS to the government sh
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.
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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 ope
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Yeah, they ought to gather some sort of consortium of open source companies to lobby with the gove... oh wait.
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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.
How does this work? Does the TPM read the BitLocker binary directly from disk? Or is there any other way that it can make sure that the BitLocker binary hasn't been altered?
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The TPM boot process works off of "scan the next segment to be loaded and executed, pass the hash to the TPM". The TPM then keeps track of the hash process and when asked to unseal a key, either hands the key over if the cumulative hash matches, or refuses.
The TPM never is an active part of the boot process, it just sits there, accepts hashes, then either hands a key over, or doesn't.
Advantages of this in a FDE system:
Replacing the preboot authorization (PBA) code cannot be done without detection.
The TPM c
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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.
Parent
Non-Profits? (Score:5, Funny)
1. Create open source software
2. Promote it to money grubbing politicians
3. ????
4. Non-profit!
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And of course 20% for the warranty.
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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 ju
They already do (Score:2)
Microsoft has a conspicuous office in Reston, VA. They probably have more in the metro DC area. The problem for them is that, as crazy as it may sound, they are just a lemur fighting the 800lb gorillas like Lockheed IT, Northrop Grumman IT, Boeing IT, BAE Systems IS and General Dynamics IT who have signif
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Government is about spreading the wealth around and bringing bucks to your home state. It's not really wrong, its just how democracy actually is.
Really, is that what democracy is all about? Darned, I was wrong all along!
I thought it was a form of government in which the right to govern is vested in the citizens of a country or a state and exercised through a majority rule.
I also never assumed that there would be some underlying goal to make life better for all, not just a few individuals. However, I did most certainly hope that this would be the case.
What a bummer!
Matt
P.S. OK, OK, I stole that second line from Wikipedia!
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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
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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 Br
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Umm... Generally what you say is true, but this is a bad example because an LPD isn't a CV and vice versa. Very different ships for very different jobs.
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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 opp
FOSS will have to change to be more competitive (Score:4, Insightful)
The federal government has no bias against using open source software. There are two major factors that affect it:
1) Someone has to pay to get FOSS put through an evaluation process to be verified for suitability and safety (commercial vendors often pay this or coordinate with a contracting firm). This fee can be hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it applies to every component that has not been previously approved. If you bring in 5 Java FOSS libraries that haven't been used before, you could be looking at as much as a $3M cost to get them certified.
2) Versions have to be done more carefully. To most federal agencies, KDE 3.0, 3.5, 4.0 and 4.1 would be distinct versions each requiring evaluation. Microsoft has an advantage over desktop Linux in that respect since it releases Windows updates every few years, and service packs can be evaluated at everyone's convenience.
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If you want only a few versions with long support to evaluate it might be better to stick to for example Ubuntu 6.06 LTS & Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Then you wouldn't have to evaluate a new version every six months.
But sure, it won't beat the ~10 year support period of Windows XP :)
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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
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This is an excellent couple of points, and to add to them, vendors that want to use FOSS AND want to have government business need to make more careful choices about their software selection. Case in point:
I work for a government contractor, and we recently took delivery of a network analysis device that shall remain nameless. This device came with Fedora Core 4 on it. I was tasked with doing the security initialization of the device, and I noted that several things needed to be updated on it in order to
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By default, and in virtually all deployments, windows does not comply with various government security rules... Like having no support for AES encryption until very recently (and gov tend to still use old versions) or having unnecessary and excessively complex services (like msrpc and netbios) open...
Whoever audits the system is supposed to flag these issues and if they cant be fixed, detail how they are mitigated (eg firewall the unnecessary ports)... Unfortunately, a lot of people doing this don't even fo
Apples and oranges (Score:2)
Most agencies have their own security standards. If they can't meet the bare minimum, then they won't allow those projects to be deployed. When they look at other products their question is simply "is it any good at all?" because they are starting from a position of pure ignorance.
Oracle and Sun? (Score:2)
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The acquisition hasn't completed, so they are still 2 separate companies for now..
No support (Score:3, Interesting)
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Yes, i've known a lot of people like this...
The solution is to setup a consultancy company and sell him some free software for an extremely high price (rebrand it if necessary)... He will feel happier because he paid through the nose for it, and you'll feel happier because you just made yourself a tidy sum.
I knew someone who was totally against anything free or anything associated with linux etc, and yet he uses cisco asa firewalls (linux based), vmware esx (linux based), cisco call manager (linux based), s
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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.
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Think of this as a concert (Score:3, Funny)
In that metaphor, the FSF is a highland bagpipe. Yeah, it's music, but it simply doesn't play well with others.
The FSF plays in one octave with no rests, and literally marches off to its own 4/4 tune, while the rest of the orchestra sits there wondering.
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This is only an opinion, but I think the FSF isn't involved because RMS is largely incapable of compromise. While the overall goals of the organization may mesh well with the overall goals of the FSF, if there is even one pillar of the organizations mission statement that fails to meet an FSF standard, or one commercial company involved who has done something "non-free" that RMS disagrees with, chances are the FSF won't play. Strategic compromises with others who share your larger goals, but may agree with
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Best bagpipe analogy ever.
Indeed. However, due to lack of coffee, I cannot seem to grasp anything less than a car analogy.
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They are unlikely to realize substantial, direct short-term savings from adopting OSS; for the off-the-shelf software (things like desktop OS's and basic office software), short-term license savings will probably be consumed by increased support and retraining costs, for new development, open source requi