Hi Dido,
On 9/15/06, Rafael 'Dido' Sevilla <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Dean Michael Berris wrote:
> FOSS has nothing to do with "the sanctity of the public's right to
> access public information". ANY government document is _public
> information_.
Well, if your document happens to be in a format which not everyone can
use thanks to the fact that it's in a proprietary format for which few
people can afford the program to read it, then so much for it being
public information.
This still has nothing to do with FOSS directly, but has something to
do about "open standards".
"Yes, it's public information, here's the document.
Now go pay Microsoft 500 US dollars for a copy of MS Office 2003 so you
can read it." Or are you so daft as to advocate people use an unlicensed
copy of Microsoft Office just so they can read government documents,
which SHOULD be public information? And I thought the government is
trying to be serious about enforcing copyright law. We don't need
Microsoft, or any other proprietary software company, charging tolls for
what should be free access to information published by our government.
Then the publishing process has to be changed -- or the format. That
doesn't mean the government should not use MS Office 2003, but it
should publish the information in a format that's universally
recognized as an open standard format.
--
Dean Michael C. Berris
C++ Software Architect
Orange and Bronze Software Labs, Ltd. Co.
web: http://software.orangeandbronze.com/
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
mobile: +63 928 7291459
phone: +63 2 8943415
other: +1 408 4049532
blogs: http://mikhailberis.blogspot.com http://3w-agility.blogspot.com
http://cplusplus-soup.blogspot.com
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