Subject: RE: Linux in the NY Times today
From: James Zuelow (jamesz@ideafamilies.org)
Date: Thu Sep 05 2002 - 12:40:37 AKDT
> -----Original Message-----
> Christopher Erickson
> Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 9:20 AM
> To: aklug@aklug.org
> Subject: Re: Linux in the NY Times today
>
>
>
> That is just what Nazi Germany would have done.
>
> Embrace your enemies with a smile and then slowly squeeeeeeeze.
>
> -Christopher Erickson
>
Well, I have a slightly different take on it. If you look at the member
companies you'll see that many of them are proprietary software companies or
other companies that have close relationships with them (such as CompTIA).
What these companies don't want to see is a law stating that "all government
software must be open source." This would in their eyes unfairly block them
out of the market. Actually in my eyes that is unfair as well. In some
situations, proprietary software may be the better technical choice and I
don't think it is wise to limit your options. I'll go out on a limb and say
that I believe that INFORMATION should be available in non-proprietary
formats (like OpenOffice's XML format) - what generates that information is
less important, as long as the public is aware of such things as licensing
fees, etc.*
Microsoft's little agenda here may in fact end up helping the situation out.
If Microsoft's legion of lobbyists get the Federal (and State) government to
set up a technical merit only selection process, it may help open source
gain more market share within the government when open source projects can
use Microsoft's own rhetoric against them in the future.
Cheers,
James
*[Offtopic]
In these days of serious budget shortfall for the State of Alaska, it might
be an interesting question to ask just how much money is going to Microsoft
every year, and how much of that would be saved by moving to a standard
workplace package like Mandrake & OpenOffice. The initial transition costs
would be high - consultants for retraining the IT staff, and a temporary
productivity loss due to users being unfamiliar with the new environment,
but long term you would not have to rotate equipment as often and the
licensing/tech support fees would be greatly reduced. There would be some
really hairy messes to clean up that would not happen overnight. Microsoft
Access seems to be very popular in State offices because it is so handy for
creating a small, customized database for a particular office's
requirements. There isn't a simple drop in replacement for it like Word or
Excel has with OpenOffice, AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc. So training people up on
one of the various SQL databases and a GUI admin tool would take time and
probably generate a lot of friction. I'm sure there are other similar
situations. (What does AkPAY run on - a *nix server somewhere?)
[/Offtopic]
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