[ Thanks to Ville
Oksanen for this link. ]
“Do big government and open-source software mix? Fans of free
software may be about to find out, if a report in this week’s
Federal Times is on the money. Quoting an unnamed “senior White
House official,” the Federal Times reports that the White House,
worried about an over-reliance on Microsoft and concerned with
security issues, is planning to “diversify the types of operating
systems software purchased by the government.”
“According to the weekly newspaper — a Gannett subsidiary
targeted at federal government employees — the National Security
Council “soon will create a new office to assess the ways federal
agencies could make greater use of open-source, or nonproprietary,
software that is freely available to anyone.”
“The news is intriguing on several levels. Open-source software
advocacy has historically included a strong libertarian sentiment.
As open-source evangelist Eric Raymond is wont to argue,
open-source software — software programs in which the underlying
code is made freely available to the general public — is simply
better, and the free market will eventually recognize that fact to
the detriment of proprietary software companies.“