Fortiter Et Recte
Malaysia started looking into FOSS for government back in 2004. Now, it appears they have reached 95% adoption across the government.
Some 95 percent of Malaysia’s government agencies have adopted open source software (OSS), but the remaining 5 percent have not warmed to the concept–and is unlikely to anytime soon, according to a government official.
Jeremy’s talk at LCA 2010 provides a personal perspective on Microsoft in relation to Free software. Jeremy has of course had a lot to do with Microsoft, being a principle Samba developer.
“We have a system that is absolutely free that we can do anything with, so why are we so obsessed with picking on Microsoft? Shouldn’t we leave the elephant alone and stop poking it with sticks? Well, the problem is they aren’t going to leave us alone.”
Yep, the Kiwis beat us at everything these days and now those sensible chaps in Government begin trials of Linux and free software.
In 2003, the NZ government recommended use of Free software on the desktop for agencies (not just the server side). Now, we’re starting to see it happen. Hurrah!
The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Horizons Regional Council and NZ Post will all begin trialling the replacement of their existing Windows desktops with machines running Linux and other open source software in February.
It’s almost enough to want to move overseas and become a Kiwi.
It has just been revealed that the Australian Government spends “over half a billion dollars each year” on proprietary software licenses. That’s somewhere over $500,000,000.
The Greens are heading a call for the Government to use free software and for the first time in my life I find myself agreeing with them.
Greens communication spokesman Scott Ludlam said:
“We know [software] costs are sky high and governments are a huge revenue source for companies like Microsoft, but there are also very strong public policy grounds for using open-source software. And one is to make sure that government information is accessible to the largest number of people as possible at no cost to them.”
It was on the front page of the Canberra Times yesterday.
If the PM wants to save money, here’s a great way to do it. In fact, for the cost of licenses for a single year, the Government could hire 5000 full time highly paid open source developers. By leveraging existing free software it wouldn’t be too hard to build anything and everything that the Government uses for it and the Educational sectors.
-c
While I’m still up, I might as well tell you about my latest article, “Proprietary Software and Linux: Good, Bad or Somewhere in Between?”.
This comes on the heels of Canonical asking users to vote on which software (such as Adobe Photoshop and Apple’s iTunes) they would like to see made available through Ubuntu.
..is complete rubbish.
Essentially, Microsoft has made a pledge (note, not a promise!) NOT TO SUE “open source” developers who create software for “their flagship products” SO LONG AS THEY DON’T SELL IT.
If You engage in the commercial distribution or importation of software derived from an open source project or if You make or use such software outside the scope of creating such software code, You do not benefit from this promise for such distribution or for these other activities.
I’m pretty sure that will be in violation of anti-competitive laws in just about every country in the world.
Microsoft calls this promise:
The most comprehensive commitment to the promotion of interoperability in the history of the software industry.
HAHA, now that is funny. Guess they’ve never heard about a little thing called open standards and the free software movement.
Being in the spotlight means people often take things you say our of context. I’m speaking of Richard Stallman, who recently got hammered over his “church of emacs” speech and perspective on Mono.
So if you see a discussion of the topic of Mono/ .NET/C#, etc, in which people do not understand the issue properly, please post a correction and cite this article as a link.
If you read that anyone says that RMS “attacked Mono”, please post that he did not attack Mono at all, and ask them to read what he actually said.
There’s enough FUD flying around as it is.
The Free Software Foundation has published a reply to Microsoft’s Community Promise surrounding C# and CLI. Here’s a snippet:
Incomplete Standards
The ECMA 334 and 335 specifications describe the core C# language, including information about standard libraries that must be available in any compliant implementation. However, there are several libraries that are included with Mono, and commonly used by applications like Tomboy, that are not required by the standard. And just to be clear, we’re not talking about Windows-specific libraries like ASP.NET and Windows Forms. Instead, we’re talking about libraries under the System namespace that provide common functionality programmers expect in modern programming languages: binary object serialization, regular expressions, XPath and XSLT, and more.
Microsoft needs to do more to assure the free software community that they will not sue over the use of .NET. Release an irrevocable license for all patents in .NET (or at least Mono’s implementation) that remains in effect even after a sale of said patents. Or make a deal with Novell and get them to release Mono under GPLv3..
Came across a handy little page on the Songbird wiki pointing to contributed builds for various distros. If you want to install Songbird using your distros package manager, maybe this will help.
-c