ZDNet: In Defense of Proprietary Software

“The International Telecommunications Union’s World Summit on
the Information Society (or WSIS for short, because we need more
acronyms in the world) was last week. The conference was intended
as a forum to discuss the information technology revolution, and
more specifically, the growing ‘digital divide’ between rich and
poor nations…

“Of particular interest, however, was a moderated debate on the
issue of preferential treatment for open-source products in
government procurement, a topic I have discussed in the past. Four
of the panelists were pro-preference, and represented Malaysia,
Cuba, Peru and Kenya. The lone voice opposing such preferences was
Bob Kramer, Vice President for Public Policy from the Computing
Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), a group upon which Bruce
Perens has trained his ever-present ‘Microsoft is the source of
everything bad that happens’ machine gun…”

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