[Wolves] Online petition to use Linux

[Andy Smith]

On Mon, Feb 19, 2007 at 04:23:25PM +0000, Kevanf1 wrote:
> On 19/02/07, Andy Smith <andy at lug.org.uk> wrote:
> 
> >If a customer of mine started preaching to me about what software I
> >had to use for the company's internal processes then I would not be
> >impressed. :)
> >
> 
> But in this case the company is the UK, we the public are the
> shareholders and we are the ones paying for the proprietary software.

Customers of all companies "pay for" the software those companies
use, in the price they pay for the services of the company.

> Ok, if open source doesn't do the job I agree, use proprietary.  But
> while I'm paying my taxes I would rather that the money goes to other
> things instead of to a billionaire if at all possible.

As far as I am aware Mark Shuttleworth is not that far off being a
billionaire having sold his SSL business to the crawling doom that
is Verisign.  I am sure there are some very well off people at
Redhat and Novell as well.

The money spent is pretty much the least of my worries as Microsoft
practically give it away for free anyway to governments and so on,
to ensure lock-in; something that would not be an issue if open
standards were mandated.  So to me that is by far the more important
battle and IMHO people should not be distracted by vague handwaving
and a "down with Microsoft" sentiment.

Cheers,
Andy

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