Due to the economic meltdown that we have hearing about so much lately, many governments are nowadays searching for a better manner in which to carry out business.One of these governments is the Canadian government.
Because of the need for a stimulus package akin to that launched in the US, the Canadian economy has registered the first deficit in so long as a decade. Usually, when in a recession (or its wicked brother the depression) governments tend to spend more in order to revitalize the economy. The Canadian government therefore, is not looking for ways to decrease expenditure, rather, the government is thinking of ways to "spend smarter". Along comes open source software. The government has merely " issued an official Request For Information (RFI)". However, the fact that they are willing to go down this innovative road is in its own right, quite interesting. You can read the full story here. This move was also augmented by another one calling for a move towards Open Source Software when an open letter was sent to president Obama calling for the US government to rely more on open source software in its upcoming projects.
On the other side of the Atlantic, things are not looking so good for closed source software either -in this case Microsoft. The EU has much stronger antitrust laws than those in the US(antitrust laws are those that ensure that a specific company is not gaining enough clout in the market to become a monopoly), and the EC (European Commission) has determined that Microsoft has abused its position as a dominant company in the OS sector through bundling IE to Windows. There are a lot of accusations to Microsoft that it does not follow the standards and some are arguing that building software strictly along set standards should be mandatory. You can read this story here http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/02/mozilla-call-for-eu-intervention-in-browser-war-is-troubling.ars .
There is a staring contest in which closed source software companies were looking their counterparts in the open source industry eye-ball to eye-ball, and I believe the former just blinked and that the latter still have a lot to reveal. To view some of the interesting developments for Open Source Software see http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/01/alook-back-at-the-open-source-victories-of-2008.ars.
2 comments:
That is very interesting, and personally, I think it is very promising that governments will support opensource software. I think that will increase the support and the need to advance in this area providing more services to users (:.
I just hope Micro$ won't interrupt this by providing its software for free to the Canadian government.
Regarding Internet explorer being integrated in Losedows. I read an article two days ago which talks about a lawsuit Opera made against Microsoft regarding that issue. The sad thing is that Mozilla refused to support them. Opera lost the case.
Hi Tito,
It seems that M$ has hard times nowadays, but I think we have to wait long time till M$ loose its place [at least it has the Gulf countries to feed its budget for the next decade;)]. Anyway, open source can help the financial crisis while I am not sure if the free software can do the same. By the way 'here' is not linked [write your post immediately in the blogspot ;)]
Post a Comment