MESSAGE
| DATE | 2003-02-15 |
| FROM | From: "Stanley A. Klein"
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] Re: [fairuse] Re: a proposed solution
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At 02:45 PM 2/15/2003 -0500, Ruben Safir wrote:
>When I lead everyone down to Washington for the DOC hears under NY Fair Use,
>it was clearly not obstructive, and it was completely productive.
>
>NY Fair Use is leading this again, and Monday is the time to discuss the
>details of this.
>
>The NY Fair use agenda on Monday will include a stratergy session for the
>egov-OS and we are tieing it into an effort to affect New York City Hall.
>
>The goal in both events will be to force government to use Free Software to
>assure fair use and equal competition for Free Software marketers.
Hmmm. You have been trying to affect NY CIty Hall and have been
encountering some kind of resistance. Are you ascribing to the federal
government the same attitudes and issues you are encountering in NY City
Hall?
You should know that the federal government is both a big user and a big
direct and indirect producer of free/open-source software. Only one area
is official policy, and that is supercomputing. The use of
free/open-source in security research is another area that made it to a
formal solicitation (from DARPA) about a year or two ago. Everything else
is hard to identify. You just have to know it's there. One spin-off of
the conference (and the related activities of the Federal CIO Council) is
getting people who are using free/open-source talking to each other and
identifying the breadth and depth of federal government use of
free/open-source.
Microsoft can't say "that stuff is no good" if someone else can get up and
say "we've been using it all along for very important work and it's been
doing a great job." And that's what is starting to happen.
A City Hall is a different situation. For example, the City of Rockville
has a "Microsoft shop." I've been advocating free/open-source to the
Director of Information and Technology for a few years. I even gave him a
copy of OpenOffice.org to evaluate. About a month ago he proudly announced
that Rockville is getting its first Linux server. He was even talking
about hiring a Linux person to replace someone who left. Very slow
progress, but that's what City Halls and County office buildings are like.
With cities and counties, a good time to advocate free/open-source is
during budget crunches or after Microsoft has done something stupidly
arrogant (which happens with increasing frequency).
Stan Klein
____________________________
New Yorker Free Software Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
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