“The U.S. Defense Department should think twice before embracing open-source software, a trade association is advising. The Initiative for Software Choice, which counts Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Intel among its backers, said in comments filed Tuesday that the department should “avoid crafting needless and potentially detrimental IT policy to promote the use” of open-source software.” Read the report at News.com. At a time that countries like Germany and Japan begin to invest in OSS/GPL, Microsoft tries to hold US back. Are the Group’s worries justified? Discuss.
Group Urges Limits on Open Source
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Considering who The Initiative represents, is anybody surprised by their cleverly crafted comments?
My favorite part of the article was: “…avoid crafting needless and potentially detrimental IT policy to promote the use of open-source software.”
That is a laugh. Detrimental to who? Microsoft. I don’t think Intel and Cisco really care since their products can be used with OSS as well. The customer sure as hell isn’t being detrimented by using OSS.
Of course, “Software Choice” really means “Proprietary Software Choice”. If you are interested in real choice, visit Bruce Perens’ Sincere Choice site at http://www.sincerechoice.org/
yup – they’ll loose profits if they don’t sell software or hardware/software packages.
but i hate it when a post/article that ends in ‘discuss’. it usually indicates that there is nothing to discuss.
Wow I just love the U.S! Everybody here is totaly imune to coprate money. ARRRRRG! Ok maybe Im bitter but I just see the goverment going downhill after bush! Keyoto protocall, GONE!, Cilvil liberties! Gone! ( in the name of anti-terrorism so its ok!). ARRRRRRRRRRRRRR!! Is this just the US of good ‘ole A or is it like this in your country! I HATE HATE BUSH and all this corprate bullshit of buying democrosity!@!@#!@#!#!@
Um, kindda OT. Sorry.
You cannot put this genie back in its bottle unfortunatley. Open source is here to stay in one form or another. The truth is that it will decimate an entire section of the computer software industry. But like computing always has been only the paranoid and lucky survive. Chaneging your buisness practises to produce custom software instead of off the shelf software is one way to survive. Going in a service direction is also another way to get around it.
Even if microsoft didn’t exist this would still be happening and I wouldn’t want to be the supplier of a software product that lost its market to a free product. A saw this coming a long time ago and though will Open source kill programming as an industry off all together. But then I realised that some applications have to be custome made like buisness software. Other software needs creative input that cannot be just pulled from an archive, like games do.
This will get worse when Open source gets more of a grip on reusable components.
You make an exelent point and I completly argree, but you sound almost sad about open source doing well no and in the future, or did I read you wrong?
Wow I just love the U.S! Everybody here is totaly imune to coprate money. ARRRRRG! Ok maybe Im bitter but I just see the goverment going downhill after bush! Keyoto protocall, GONE!, Cilvil liberties! Gone! ( in the name of anti-terrorism so its ok!). ARRRRRRRRRRRRRR!! Is this just the US of good ‘ole A or is it like this in your country! I HATE HATE BUSH and all this corprate bullshit of buying democrosity!@!@#!@#!#!@
Um, kindda OT. Sorry.
You took the words right outta my mouth… except you forgot to mention
the increase in religion being shoved down everyone’s throat by the gov’t and george “gee-zuzzz” bush. Sorry, even more OT.
Yeah, why do I get the impression that the company who’s name starts with the 13th letter of the english alphabet holds the most sway in this so-called “Initiative”?… I’m growing so tired of hearing about ms did this and ms did that that I’m beginning to read computer news sites less and less. please, mr. gates, take your so-called “innovations” and greed and just go away. I’m not a Linux or OSS zealot, I just want a good computing experience and the last time I had one on a microsoft product, it was, like, windows 3.0. I can deal with their products at least some of the time but why do they have to be such greedy corporate monsters? Like we don’t have enough of those in the US already?
They should choose the best software for the job, and of course when price comes into it (as it tends to) and good OSS may well come out on top. But i really don’t think govts should be forced into either.
One thing govt’s should do is release in someway all tax payer funded code where possible/useful. Though maybe people would complain that other countrys got to use it too.
Honestly, I don’t trust somebody who doesn’t have a spiritual existance. Would you trust someone who didn’t believe their actions had consequences? (Besides materialistic, there’s nothing I despise more than a materialistic person)
I also don’t trust people who would put an ideology before practical purpose. If having the IT department of the nation’s security based on open source even leaves a REMOTE chance of being exploitable, then there’s a conflict of interest. If it was developed in house, there would be a far lower risk. Of course, this is the United States. It’s _CHEAPER_ to use OSS.
“Citing news reports, Amnesty named several U.S.-based companies as alleged suppliers of technology used in the Chinese government’s crackdown on Internet speech. These included Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Nortel Networks and filtering software supplier Websense.”
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-975517.html
Of course, our favorite “thick face, black heart” company, Sun, is on the list as well. They are the only company that is allegedly pro-Linux that sells tools of tyranny to the Chinese government.
– Red Pill
Honestly, I don’t trust somebody who doesn’t have a spiritual existance. Would you trust someone who didn’t believe their actions had consequences?
Well, I’m not a spiritual person, but I believe my actions have consequences. I could call you an ignorant f**kstain (action) and get banned by Eugenia (consequence), but I will reframe
I also don’t trust people who would put an ideology before practical purpose.
I don’t either. Here’s a message to zealots on both sides – closed source is not evil (RMS) and open source is not a cancer (Microsoft). IMHO, there’s plenty of room in this world for both to co-exist together, assuming both sides would be willing to put down their rocks and dig the underwear out of the crack in their asses. But, fat chance of that happening. Anyway, If it’s a quality piece of software, then use it! Use the best tool for the job – don’t worry about the politics.
Honestly, it really sucks when people/companies adopt/use a program, ideology, or technology merely for the sake of promoting said program, ideology, or technology. A classic example of this is the recent news that Sun is going to use Java as a scripting language in Star Office. WTF is that all about?? Probably not much more than to keep feeding the Java machine, as surely there are better solutions for this task, no?
I think the Defence Department should keep using opensource software. think about all the tax money that would be wasted if Microsoft were to sell the Defence Department a Pentagon Licence,
And Microsoft products don’t have any more reliability than any Opensource project.
If you want to show people over there in the US just how far they’ve strayed from their ideals use this quote : “They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” (Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759)
On topic : the disadvantage to open source is that it is as open for you as it is for your enemies, sure the Defense department can change the code but developping and maintaining software is hardly their “core business” so they probably don’t want to do to much of that.
The group also assailed the General Public License (GPL), which generally permits programmers to incorporate code released under the GPL as long as they make their own source code available.
Only if you distribute the software to others! If I wanna write MIBLinux, and make substantial changes to the kernel, I *don’t* have to make those changes public unless I give/sell the software to someone else. Even then, I’m only obligated to give it to the person who holds the software, not everybody. Now, in the sphere of the government, programmers, under goverment employment, could take GPL code and not redistribute it to anyone other than governmental agencies. The source needn’t be released in that case, and they’ve no obligation to contribute their changes back. It’s generally accepted practice that they would, but it is by no means required. In fact, if I was in charge of building secure systems, I would do just that…..take secure GPL software, and hire programmers to maintain it, keeping the source closed internally. This is in stark contrast to buying software from someone else, and not having any ability to modify it.
These last few weeks I have been playing with Linuxfromsratch.org. Creating my own linux. This is the first time I have not installed Windows on my computer. As I play with GNU tools, kernel, kde and many other peoples work with I started to realise the potentental for open source. Do I think open source is better? No. Do I think it will be some day? Yes.
In government and offices everywere I see coruption, ignorance and stupidiy. Most people in control of our lives don’t know what they are doing. Focused perhaps on their job or envy of others or the always importance or profit/votes and not the quality of the product. This is to be expected and will always exist to a certan extent. This is why comunism was thought up. Everyone helps and works to gether, but it failed. It failed because there are finite amounts of everything like food, electronics, houses, timber and so on. So, natualy, some people wanted more than others and such coruption started and comunism colaped. If it were not for these natural human emotions comunism would be an uptopia.
In the world of computers, bits are copyied with ease and infinte amounts are available. More or less everyone has the same access to gpl code as anyone else. Everyone is equal. No president or ignorant boss can controls what you create with your hands. On the net with open source there is a freedom that there is no were else. Yes, it costs money to put up servers and run them. Yes, some people have better computers than others but the idea works and is alive today, right now on computers throghout the world. This force of thousands of geeks around the world cant be stoped. At some point open source will have so many programers that no group of people could posibly compete with.
Closed source will always be around. It is not evil. But soon ( in my lifetime) open source will the run the bulk of the computers in the world and I belive this to be a great thing and one of the few things to keep out of the hands of ‘big brother’ and anyone with money.
PS: Forgive my writing, I HATE writing and im bad at it
Does anyone else find it laughable/ironic/hypocritical that the U.S. government continues to pursue Microsoft for antitrust violations while at the same time being their single biggest customer? If they really gave two *expletive deleted*-s about monopolies and antitrust law, they would not subscribe to a single vendor policy (which, I understand, is actually forbidden by US government policy in every other sector except computer vendors) and get the heck out of the sack with Microsoft.
Sorry, kinda got off-topic there. My real point is that this report and its recommendations are no surprise, and given the US government’s track record, they will swallow every word of it.
God I hate government
ok, now everybody is posting their anti-capitalism views, which i for the most part agree with, but let me point out that this is _not_ a policy that the dept of defence has accepted! just something some lobby group wrote. y’all are not just shooting the messenger, but the department that the message was directed at!
yes, they’re both evil, but think for a moment before you speak. this is just some bullshit some lobby group came up with. not us dept of defence policy.
i’ve heard to arguement being launched here, Forcing Relegion down people throat:
“You took the words right outta my mouth… except you forgot to mention the increase in religion being shoved down everyone’s throat by the gov’t and george “gee-zuzzz” bush. Sorry, even more OT.”
and that M$ backs this plan.
i only have two points.
1st. i’m agnostic, which means i don’t know if there’s a god, and really don’t care… almost like an atheist. but i have no problem with relegion. i adhere to most of jesus’s teaching and find the strong morals preached by the bible to be good. how can you say it bad? the 1st amendment protects my freedom of relegion, it, however does not protect me from relegion. SO DEAL WITH IT. SOME PEOPLE BELEIVE, SOME DON’T. GOT JUMP OFF A BRIDGE IF YOU DON’T LIKE, I DON”T REALLY CARE EITHER WAY.
2nd. Anything microcrap supports, i’m by default against. microsoft is obviously now considering Linux and other alternative os’s the use GPL or GNU to be a long term threat, an immediate threat by some. Open Source is great. free, stable and secure software is a good thing…. you can pay $299 for MS XP Professional and get a pretty operating system. or you could pay nothing and get a real OS. it’s up the user. and the DOD thinks with it’s check book 90% of the time. so all you money loving capatilist can call GNU/GPL satan in disguese all you want. don’t really care… just don’t forget to change you tampons… people that march to the microcrap drum often come across as whine little babies…. and you demonstrate you lack of forward/progessive thinking each and everytime you open you mouth. if you happy with MS, fine, keep wasting your money, just don’t crap on us Linux/Alt OS users for not wasting our money.
Does anyone else find it laughable/ironic/hypocritical that the U.S. government continues to pursue Microsoft for antitrust violations while at the same time being their single biggest customer?
the us has never persued ms for antitrust violations. it was a bunch of states. like the eu pursuing some company from frankfurt for antitrust violations and the german govt buying from that company would not be hypocritical. i can see this as being hard for germans to understand, tho… no offence intended but you folks tend to think as one unit. we psycho americans tend to each have our own opinion that is more right than everybody else’s
also note that the us has not adopted this policy, and that microsoft is microsoft’s single biggest customer.
The Initiative for Software Choice
That group of words alone gives us a view of what has gone wrong. In the US there is a sort of plutocratic totalitarism. It’s just like in 1984 (the book, not the year): the Ministry of Love. It’s the precise same thing. You say that you are what you are not, because if you’re rich (powerful) enough nobody will dare to say “Hey, you’re not actually supporting choice”.
That’s what has gone wrong: the crisis (in a strict sense straight from ancient greek, crisis means change), the criticism, the sensible doubt. How can someone like Bush win an election? When Haider’s party was second in Austria’s general election, they were about to be thrown out of the EU!! Fascism is not accepted in Europe. But fascism is not only accepted in the US but also encouraged by the masses, and disguised as democracy. It’s just an example.
When it comes to software, be sure that the place where OSS will have public funding will not be the US. Most likely it will be Europe (it is Europe now, see LinEx for example) who will lead the deployment of OSS.
Dave,
A) I’m Canadian, not German. I don’t know if I should be honoured or offended that you think my opinions fit in with the opinion melting pot of the country where I study. 😉
B) I thought that the anti-trust proceedings were initiated by the DOJ, which is a national entity, is it not? I was under the impression that the DOJ initally pursued MS for antitrust violations, and then the resulting settlement was contested by certain states who didn’t agree. Correct me if I’m wrong.
C) Check out
http://osopinion.com/perl/story/18568.html
This was my reference for the U.S. government being the largest customer of Microsoft. It’s also an excellent article in and of itself.
This article also describes how the U.S. government often imposes procurement policies which require them to make a call for bids and forbid them from purchasing more than a certain percentage of any product from a single vendor–a practice which they clearly disregard in the desktop OS market.
Anyway, thanks for your comments and I apologize if my post wasn’t 100% fact checked. My point remains, though, that I still find it ironic that the U.S. spends mountains of money on the products of a company whose business practices are being questioned in the courts by either state or federal entities (or both). It’s furthering the very monopoly they (purportedly) want to bring to justice for antitrust violations!
What ELSE would these guys say?
This is a Microsoft-backed organization which has a former patent lawyer/M$ consultant to evangelize for them. Here are a couple links:
http://www.softwarechoice.org/download_files/Maccrisken.Letter.pdf
http://news.com.com/2010-1078-281484.html?legacy=cnet
Check out the second link for a good laugh. Notice words like ‘viral’, ‘virus-like’, ‘manifesto’, etc.
But no… NO! Software Choice is just an honest, GRASSROOTS organization dedicated to fairness in government software choices! Really!
In fact, if I was in charge of building secure systems, I would do just that…..take secure GPL software, and hire programmers to maintain it, keeping the source closed internally.
The problem with this approach is that you have a harder and harder time keeping your fork in synch with the official release.
It’s often pretty hard to justify not rolling genuine improvements back into the main tree. StarOffice has some proprietary addons to OpenOffice.org, but since Sun are also funding most of OOo development, they can make sure stuff stays easy enough to synch up.
Open source may kill the software industry as we know it, but not all programmers work for the software industry as we know it. My current position involves writing software for use by my company. Furthermore, almost every job posting I’ve seen for programmers has been at companies that aren’t primarily in the business of selling software.
Mitre wrote the original (really interesting) report; the way I see it, they’ve been using GPL stuff since the year dot, and as a contractor to DoD, don’t want MS crap shoved down their throats. It’s a technical issue for technical people, but being portrayed in political terms so politicians can understand it.
I am glad at moment$ like thi$ that I live in Canada where I can, $peaking for an $everal University research departments, tell Monopolo$oft to $tuff their $oft in their a$$e$.
A little off topic, but hopefully interesting:
> Open source may kill the software industry as we know it, > but not all programmers work for the software industry as > we know it. My current position involves writing software > for use by my company. Furthermore, almost every job
> posting I’ve seen for programmers has been at companies
> that aren’t primarily in the business of selling
> software.
It would be really interesting if the primary job of programmers eventually came to be rewriting open source software for business users who needed custom software for their purposes.
Also if open source becomes the defacto software option then the hardware industry might well suffer bigtime. This is what worries me the most about OSS becoming popular. OSS isn’t nearly so upgrade-hungry as MS software and tends to get smaller (if passed the feature-addition area of the development cycle) and quicker with time while new applications (e.g. more graphical desktop software like KDE) fill in the new performance gaps created by a MS-forced upgrade cycle.
We all enjoy the way hardware is getting better every month, with OSS ruling the roost it’s possible hardware inprovements might stagnate.
Of course a slow down in moore’s law may be a good thing..
— Snip —
We all enjoy the way hardware is getting better every month, with OSS ruling the roost it’s possible hardware inprovements might stagnate.
————
I disagree. Even recent Linux distributions (RH 8 especially) have become more CPU and RAM-hungry than before. Plus let’s not forget applications are constantly being held back by hardware. A rise in the need for less will just result in applications which can do more. I don’t think the hardware manufacturers are worried about this, especially in the video card market where every bit of performance counts. Games will always push the limit of the latest 3D hardware.
Ultimately people are realizing (and being forced to realize due to the spending freezes and economic downturn) that you don’t need a high-end PC to do e-mail (of course, we all know that already) … so it’s happening already regardless of whether OSS becomes more dominant or not.
Happy go lucky socialists. Wanna-be utopian leaders. Save your rants for your lithium parties. Kyoto Protocol= Bad science. Global warming= peltdown man. Civil liberties-gone= go back to your wonderfully free? country. Shoving religion down our throats? WTF are you talking about? Between you idiots trying to force a ‘climate change levy’ on industrialized nations and ALL of you thinking that communism would have worked if only people weren’t the way they are.
I like open source software but that does not mean that I agree with this socialist crap spouted by alex, jay, others. Like many environmentalists, they want to start up their own utopia. They have ideas that sound great in theory but are IMPOSSIBLE to implement because people are human. Maybe if one of you could find an empty place on the planet and GO there. Start up your favorite utopia. Report back to us in a couple 100 years with all of your incredible successes then and only then should we have to listen to your drivel.
I will fight monopolists every step of the way but I will also fight socialist idiots from attempting to turn open source software into another one their ridiculous utopian paradise movements. That means microsoft and people like alex will have me breathing down their necks for the rest of my life, because noone is going to rain on this parade if I can help it. And idiots like alex that help promote the idea that open source will lead to some wonderful utopia of peace, love, and freedom are just as dangerous to the movement of open source as microsoft. Leave politics and religion out of the arguments for and against open source and you will be doing the best thing you can possible do for the promotion of open source.
A classic example of this is the recent news that Sun is going to use Java as a scripting language in Star Office. WTF is that all about?? Probably not much more than to keep feeding the Java machine, as surely there are better solutions for this task, no?
A subset of Java might fit well, especially if it’s already installed on your system. Anyway, it beats Visual Basic.
I *don’t* have to make those changes public unless I give/sell the software to someone else. Even then, I’m only obligated to give it to the person who holds the software, not everybody.
But how does one protect companies that the government hires to improve a system, who also want to sell their work commercially (with the source closed).
At some point open source will have so many programers that no group of people could posibly compete with.
They’ll still need day jobs. MS won years ago.
or doesn’t.
There is a great little article on the web called “The Last Dinosaur and The Tarpits of Doom” that predicts fairly accurately what is in store for Microsoft. (http://muq.org/~cynbe/rants/lastdino.htm) Microsoft is in the process of disintregrating before our eyes. Its hard to view the process objectively because rather than being able to look back at this from a historical point of view, we are viewing it from a current events point of view. We have to somehow seperate the influences of our current environment from common sense.
Recent new items have pointed out the following.
1. Open Source is available freely and openly and can be modofied by all who wish to use it.
2. Microsoft is losing money on every venture except its OS and Office software.
3. Microsoft is desperately trying to open new markets and products to reduce its dependence on the OS and Office software for revenue.
4. Bill and Steve are trotting the globe giving away revenue in hopes of either stopping or slowing the spread of number 1.
5. Microsoft is using its money to attempt to influence the political process in the US and other countries. Again a revenue drain because buying “laws” is not cheap.
6. In the meantime a steady growing parade of customers are making the switch to cheaper Open Source technologies.
7. Those customers that make the switch are able to produce a product or run a business at a lower cost than their competitors who still use Microsoft products. (contrary to the FUD that Microsoft is attempting to spread)
(http://ww1.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/fixup.pl?story=http://news.com.com/2100-1001-975399.html)
Change is inevitable and Microsoft is no exception. Microsoft is desperately trying to hold onto the past and history teaches a hard lesson otherwise. Linux does not have to be “better” than Microsoft’s products to win against the dominance of a monopolist like Microsoft. The features that users percieve as “better” will come to Open Source products as a result of its growing userbase expecting them to be there. Open Source is infinitely modifiable and those “features” will be incorporated as time goes thereby increasing the pressure on Microsoft to either become more competitive or fail. If one looks at Microsofts history the one thing they never do is really compete in the computer industry. Its obvious from recent and current events that the upper management at Microsoft won’t change their attitudes and that will be their ultimate downfall.
But how does one protect companies that the government hires to improve a system, who also want to sell their work commercially (with the source closed).
If you contract someone to write some code, it depends on the agreement between you and the contractor as to who owns that code.
If they own the code they write, I can’t see that they cannot use *that bit they wrote* in their own commerical code, even though it was originally written to tie-in with some GPL code.
This is pretty obvious when you realise that if you write the code, you can release it GPL to some people, and Proprietary to others. You can do what you want with it – it’s your code.
However, if your contractor wants to take their changes *AND* the existing GPL code, and sell it, no dice. Why should they be allowed to sell GPL code which someone else wrote, as their own proprietary code?
Lessee… we got an article that talks about a M$-funded research group suggesting OSS is bad for the DoD, and we’re asked to discuss. So far, our “discussion” has produced:
1) Someone doesn’t like Dubya Bush.
2) Someone doesn’t like hippy Communists.
3) Someone doesn’t understand why Sun likes Java so much.
4) Someone will choose not to write open-source software.
5) Someone is installing LFS (commendable, but off-topic).
Now, these are all interesting topics, but how about these OT (on-topic) questions?
1) Exactly HOW is OSS bad for the US DoD?
2) If it isn’t, how is OSS *good* for the US DoD?
3) What exactly is this new report a response to? Is OSS already being considered for wide-spread deployment for sensitive national-security level systems?
4) If so, how will this affect the demand for government contract work for civilian IT’s and software engineers?
5) Will this lead to possible government funding of OSS? How much government support will it take to make inroads against M$ and other proprietary vendors?
Just some stuff to chew on…
Objectively, I agree with Darius – anyone should be able to choose the software they believe will be the best for their situation. But it is funny though, Microsoft, the most security leak ridden software on earth, pontificating on this extremely important area.
A classic example of this is the recent news that Sun is going to use Java as a scripting language in Star Office. WTF is that all about?? Probably not much more than to keep feeding the Java machine, as surely there are better solutions for this task, no?
Damn right there are better things than wiring in a 25MB VM for “scripting”. This is otherwise known as “how to make your office suite not run on old machines”.
Of course, this is merely the first step to rewriting the whole thing in Java.
Except they’ll call it….
“Jar Office”
😉
– Red Pill
…he’s a troll, but his articles on why the US is lagging behind Europe (and Japan and nearly all over the world)on mobile because it protects Qualcomm instead of pushing for open standards. Even here in Brazil, there’s a strong movement to go from CDMA/TDMA to GSM.
Is the US crafting another national monopoly and thus losing the tech front? I think so.
Thanks, W. Bush, now we (the rest of the world) have a chance to surpass US in IT terms
To begin with:
Open Source != Free Software, which makes the icon for this “Open Source” story entirely inappropriate and misleading. It just goes to reinforce a misconception.
The Software Choice response to MITRE’s “FOSS” paper is also misleading, as they primarily refer to tradeoffs involving Free Software as a justification for limiting the consideration of Open Source software.
The integrity of our defense systems pretty much requires that the DOD be able to control the source code of whatever they use. They could make some kind of deal with MS and then do the OpenBSD thing and audit the heck out of it but the idea is that whatever they use they should create and maintain their own internal distribution and packaging. It doesn’t matter what it is, they should require that level of control over it.
Now this raises the question of whether there is any compelling reason to make such a deal with MS (or other vendor represented by Software Choice) or should they take advantage of the free source code already in existence. Personally I think they should use whatever free software they feel up to the task and save my tax dollars for other things.
I would agree that the concepts “Open Source Software” and “Free Software” are not really interchangeable. However, the sets of programs they encompass are virtually identical. Certainly all software that is FSF-style free is open source, and I can’t think of anything that the OSS initiative approves that wouldn’t also qualify as free software. OSS as an idea is really just a re-description of free software without emphasizing user freedom or other terms that might scare off businesses. The software itself is the same.
“as they primarily refer to tradeoffs involving Free Software as a justification for limiting the consideration of Open Source software”.
Again, I’m not sure what you are talking about. Do mean a business could say “We won’t use Free Software but we will use Open Source Software”, and if so, what exactly might they use that is Open Source but not Free?
Maybe you mean that a business could pragmatically realize that GPL software can save them a lot of money, without embracing the FSF goals of eliminating all proprietary software.
OS/R
— Anonymous (IP: —.cg.shawcable.net) – Posted on 2002-11-28 08:05:25
Honestly, I don’t trust somebody who doesn’t have a spiritual existance. Would you trust someone who didn’t believe their actions had consequences? (Besides materialistic, there’s nothing I despise more than a materialistic person)—
That’s why I don’t trust those religeous zellots. They do all the things that are beyond immoral all week long, but then repent on Sunday so they can do it all over again. Their actions have these consiquences … you have to repent.
sorry, Off Topic.
— I also don’t trust people who would put an ideology before practical purpose. If having the IT department of the nation’s security based on open source even leaves a REMOTE chance of being exploitable, then there’s a conflict of interest. If it was developed in house, there would be a far lower risk. Of course, this is the United States. It’s _CHEAPER_ to use OSS.–
Not only is it cheaper. Just because Open Source is tha base does not mean that you cannot develop closed source projects with it as long as you don’t sell it — I doubt that the military is out to sell their software. Besides, If the Government uses MS, than an MS security mess up can wreck havock on systems that need more than just the “support” provided by MS. They need the source so that any security leak can be plugged in real time, not MS time.
http://bjimmy.complexero.com/tptb