:osOpinion: Why The US Government Must Support Open Source
osOpinion: Why The US Government Must Support Open Source Jan 21, 2000, 06 :37 UTC (4 Talkback[s]) (5605 reads) (Other stories by Gareth Barnard
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"I believe that government must act because it's the only institution
with more clout than the megacorporations. Right-wing extremists should be
more concerned about them than about the United Nations."
"The Internet would not have come this far if its standards had not been
open from the beginning. If any one company is allowed to dictate the
standards for the Internet, it can block organizations or individuals from
access to the 'Net."
"Extensive use of Open Source will dilute the installed base of
commercial software, reducing the power of monopolies in the IT industry
and discouraging the development of new ones."
"Deploying Linux, Hurd and *BSD in Federal agencies would reduce
deployment costs because they do not require licenses... They would reduce
software development costs because they run on many different processors,
and they have free compilers/interpreters for many different languages.
They would reduce maintenance costs because you don't need frequent
distributions of anti-virus software."
