The Open Source President?
January 23, 2009 around 7am (KDE, openSUSE)Encouraging article from the Beeb:
“President Obama has said he is prepared to go through the budget “line by line” to cut wasteful spending…”
McNealey, asked to write a report on the advantages, comments:
“It’s intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software,” …”Open source does not require you to pay a penny to Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or any proprietary vendor any money.”
The article also contains quotes from OSI President Michael Tiemann:
“It’s an accident of history that proprietary standards became so entrenched so early and it’s been a colossal expense for government.”Mr Tiemann said while some departments already use open source technologies, overall it has been estimated that the global loss due to proprietary software is “in excess of $1 trillion a year.”
Here’s to hoping we see some action followed by McNealy’s report.
Powered by FireStats
I just hope it’s not just wishfull thinking. Just a small percentance of that trillion dollars per year would be game changing for a lot FLOSS projects.
After all FLOSS is not free as in beer but free as in speech. Anyway living in Greece i don’t think the day is near for a Greek goverment to take steps towards FLOSS. But is always good to see that there will be paradigms in foreing countries in EU and over the pond, to the US.
Obama has stated his intentions to implement OpenOffice in all Federal offices. http://blogs.pcworld.com/communityvoices/archives/2008/06/your_second_eco.html
That, alone, is a big start.