Hey all,

The BBC had an interesting story on OSS. Mr.McNealy has been "asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7841486.stm

Wouldn't it be cool if OSS really did start to happen in a big way and goverment offices ran linux, or at least more OSS.

Obama was once reported to have told an audience at Google that "he was a supporter of OpenSource."

IMHO, equal weight needs to be given to open standards (eg ODF)

Governments are, of course, the custodians of billions of public records and documents ... and they (sorry to have to remind you of this, Mr. Cheney...) have a legal obligation to keep them for a very long time. It's very difficult to accomplish that, "in a manner that has a future," when you are dealing with proprietary file-formats. Or, proprietary software applications.

So, governments are especially keen on having open document formats, and open-source applications with which to maintain them. That doesn't mean that the applications will be "free," only that the source-code to them will be open.

It's pretty darned obvious by now that "open source works," from a purely engineering point-of-view; that it allows us to do things that "the closed-box model" can't. It's also pretty obvious that you can make money at it.

And yet the inauguration was broadcast online using Silverlight 2.0, which doesn't work on Macs or Linux.

Like any politician he says what people want to hear.

No fan of Silverlight, but my understanding was that Moonlight was patched at the last minute so Linux users could watch the stream also.

lulz, great own goal... :|