Hi Dean! On 7/18/06, Dean Michael Berris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yeah, well DOST has employees that maintain the OpenBSD systems -- the employees cost money to keep. Although I do understand that the savings come at the price of accountability and "someone to blame when it all goes wrong", it does make sense on a case to case basis. But saying _all_ software that the government will require should be open source is taking it a bit too far -- and I'm just being pragmatic about it.
Not only is that taking it too far; that is also being unfair to the other side of the software coin. Of course, some folks may try justifying this because of Microsoft, et al.'s unfair practices, but hey, would you really want to continue the vicious cycle of unfairness? Our current civil liberties allows us to enjoy the Four Freedoms as much as we would want to (or at least, as much as we hope to,) and that goes the same for both FOSS advocates and proprietary software vendors. That said, I would rather see people making decisions based on _both_ (a) technological feasibility of a certain piece of software, (b) its effect on their liberties, including their responsibilities to that software, _and_ (c) its commercial value, rather than on just favoring one high technology or one high freedom or one very low cost. In short, let people decide their software, and push on them their responsibilities to it.
Being pragmatic about it says: okay, let's use proprietary software while there aren't any cheaper alternatives for us the meantime -- now when someone else creates open source versions or alternatives, then perhaps we can asses them then.
The problem with this is that while the proprietary solutions comes hither, no one else will be interested in implementing an open sourced one, since all their attention will be focused on getting the former solution work, and on getting themselves used to that solution (including training, certification, whatnot.) Its neither bad (it does their job) nor good (it locks them in); its just life (where one man's freedom is another man's shackle, just another example for the Law of Conservation of Suffering :P) Of course, there's the exceptional few who may try their luck on studying the old model to make their own new and free model, but without much encouragement, that falls flat. And that's exactly what we are in now; the few in-the-know of GNU/Linux are pretty much flat on their feet providing what little service they can offer, while the rest of the Republic is on Windows. No, a simple and all-encompassing `open source bill' wouldn't work; I would rather like to see this Administration offer a level ground for both open source and proprietary solutions, to be judged on both technical merit, legal feasibility, and commercial value; a very strong preference on either would not serve the Republic best. Anyhow, as I have written in an earlier mail, free software can also be commercial, and anyone (even the Administration) can provide support services to such software. More importantly, I would rather see Bill Open Sourced too. :P A bill moving to stimulate the development of free software for commercial use is one way of offering that level ground. Such a move can shift our attention from pushing just a single solution (distro, language, whatnot) to pushing for more choice, and ultimately, to pushing more power to the computing masses. We won't be driven anymore by sheer economics, nor only by `feeping creaturism'; a level playing field for both FOSS and proprietary software can do just as much as what bazaars do to cathedrals at fiesta time :) But of course, the deal about our current Administration (i.e. whether if it is indeed serving the Republic or not) is another question altogether... -- Zak B. Elep || http://zakame.spunge.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] || [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1486 7957 454D E529 E4F1 F75E 5787 B1FD FA53 851D _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List plug@lists.linux.org.ph (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
