[Newark] Government backs Open Source

[Chris Hayes]

Hm, not entirely unreasonable points. Although I reckon that you may have
been too quick to dismiss it all.

Firstly, the most important thing is to encourage open standards - ensuring
that anyone, no matter what system they are using - is on a level playing
field to consume content available. This surely encourages that.

Secondly, it's my god damn tax money - so if the government need to pay a
company to write something I'd like to know that A: it's not just
reinventing to wheel (or most of a pre-existing meal) and B: any custom
development commissioned by the government that could possibly to useful to
anyone else is available for anyone else to use in their projects. Obviously
there might be certain things for which this isn't applicable.

Thirdly, what's so bad about OpenOffice.org that for most people it wouldn't
suffice as a Microsoft Office replacement? Really? I used it (and Inkscape)
to do my English coursework last year and it looked a heck of lot better
than most peoples did.  But, honestly - real world cases - what normal
person is going to perform worse using OOo?

Fourthly, I would imagine that a lot of people who aren't so well off (as
well as a lot of people who are) aren't geeky enough to know that all this
wonderful stuff does exist, and it's all free. So if you make it commonplace
in the schools you'll spread awareness of it.

Finally, there's a reason that Linux is considered a relatively good
multi-purpose FOSS operating system. Because it is. Unlike MINIX and HURD
which haven't got the development behind them to make them widely applicable
to much of a user base.

... this is a rushed response, but I thought it'd be better out than in ^^


Kind Regards,
Christopher

On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 1:08 PM, Tom French <spindleflax at gmail.com> wrote:

> Interesting story, but I hope they're not planning to just switch
> unthinkingly to FOSS to save some cash even if the software's worse. I don't
> really think, for example, OOo is up to scratch. And of course, in some
> situations (where hopefully the gov't knows better) the fact that they have
> no warranty on FOSS might be a problem. While it's not happened yet as far
> as I know, I'm not sure how careful some of the big software is about the
> risk of an unscrupulous contributor introducing vulnerabilities. Still, good
> news for Linux and co.
>
> About the petition, I'm not sure what the argument is for an entire country
> to massively promote a non-standard operating system to children (sounds
> like the kind of evil mind-share Microsoft is so often accused of having).
> The longer text mentions a few reasons (cost to poverty-stricken families,
> risk of malware, lack of locale support for bizarre languages (bizarre
> languages that most of our school children apparently require when being
> taught in a British school) and not being designed for education) but I'm
> not really convinced. I'm pretty sure most Linux-savvy kids can handle the
> bridge between their Linux box and the school's Windows ones if they really
> can't afford Windows at home; Windows has pretty reasonable support for
> British English; if you make another OS popular, malware will be made for
> it; I'm really not sure about the last point though. What OS are they
> talking about? The only one I know off the top of my head that's intended
> largely for education is MINIX. Perhaps that would be a good thing, since
> MINIX should be much more of a major FOSS operating system than the dysmal
> nth-place it has now. I'd sign the petition for MINIX, but not for Linux.
> Linux doesn't deserve any more of the spotlight.
>
> Tom
>
> 2009/2/25 Chris Burton <Chris at 7of9b.org>
>
> > Dunno if you've already seen this, but it makes interesting reading.
>> >
>> > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7910110.stm
>> >
>>
>> On a similar note some of you might be interested in this which came
>> through
>> on the LUGMasters list earlier.
>> http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/nonMSschools/
>>
>> ChrisB.
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Newark mailing list
>> Newark at mailman.lug.org.uk
>> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/newark
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Newark mailing list
> Newark at mailman.lug.org.uk
> https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/newark
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/newark/attachments/20090226/63c8ec26/attachment-0001.htm