Hi, First, I want to say that this is one of the most interesting emails I read recently.
On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 10:47:43AM +0200, Shachar Shemesh wrote: > Hi list, > > Just came back from a meeting with Gadi Gilon. For those who don't > remeber, he is the CIO of "Kupat Cholim Klalit". He stumbled upon the > last time his name was mentioned on this list (thread starting at > http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Linux/maillists/03/09/msg00296.html), > and wanted to talk. > > I'm BCCing him on this email, so he can choose to participate actively > in this discussion (or just correct me). > > The discussion stayed, almost exclusively, on the theoretical, > ideological, front. If I understood correctly, his main point is this: > "I can see ideological/social reasons for writing/using free software, > and I see financial ones. If I try to adopt the ideological reasons > within my organization, it will never work. I cannot let every user of a > machine in every hospital change their own software. I cannot expect to Adopting the ideological reasons doesn't mean you should let users change their own software on their own machines. There is a difference between giving users the source for the programs they use and giving them the root password. It wasn't clear whether they also look at the sources they get and have a team of programmers to change/fix them, or only take the sources to external support companies. If they do have such a team, I don't see a reason why every user in every hospital can't have an account on a development machine, try his fixes, and send patches to such a team. If they are good, they will be accepted just as are patches written by the "official" programmers - properly tested, etc. > have the social contract's benifits when aquiring the software, yet not > pass the same benifits onwards. I must therefor reject the social > reasons for adoping free software". > > Please don't start flame wars saying "but there are also financial > reasons for adopting open source". He is not rejecting this possibility. > It has not come up due to lack of time. > > Now, I tried to point the practical reasons behind the social contract, > and his response rather suprised me. Basically, he has contracts with > all of his software vendors that gives him full access to the source > code in case the company goes under. His basic premesis was "I can get > competition over support in proprietary software too - Clalit did it in > the past already". That's simply amazing. Does this include also off-the-shelf software (Windows? With what NDA?), or only software written for them? When I was in the army, we also had a project which was mostly written by a company, and we also had all the sources. We even put the sources on the users' machines, although the only implication was that we could fix bugs on the spot (we didn't have communication to them from the development site). We never had a user who was a programmer and wanted to look at the sources. > > I tried to point out that this is actually means that he has forced the > vendors to turn their model, when dealing with him, into a free software > one. He acknoledged the possible truthfulness of this statement. I read > that as "the free software model is so much suprior, that I am actually > forcing closed source companies to adhere to it". I guess you may read > that to mean that the free software advantages are not as important to > him, representing a huge organization, as it is to SMBs. I guess had the > quotes in the paper said "I don't see the advantages of free software to > organizations of my caliber", things would have been understood > differently by us too. Also, this means that a big-enough group of home users can also put large enough pressure on vendors. > > Like I said before - the financial aspects of free software were not > raised at all. > > One last point - he said he is willing to talk to us further. If he > doesn't wish to join this discussion (and even if he does), I was > thinking of dedicating a Telux meeting to that end. What do you think? Sounds interesting to me. -- Didi > > Shachar > > -- > Shachar Shemesh > Open Source integration consultant > Home page & resume - http://www.shemesh.biz/ > > > > ================================================================= > To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with > the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command > echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
