Obama Looking At Open Source? 306
An anonymous reader writes "'The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through Open Source technologies and products.'
The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley's most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration."
Re:McNealy? (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah, and his company has tanked because of it. Sun/McNealy are among the worst people in Silicon Valley to ask for advice on anything. Any Sun shareholder will agree.
Re:They are free to use it, of course. (Score:1, Interesting)
The NSA "helps".
Re:The real secret...... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well if this economy needs anything right now (Score:5, Interesting)
Go ahead mark me troll, but have any of you seriously given thought to what will happen if open source were to become the norm and all these people were out of work, being asked to volunteer the skills they once got paid for?
Who says that Open Source has to be free? Seriously. This model is still completely misunderstood. Someone wants a specialized application for whatever ... they pay you to write it. You publish it under a license and share the code. That way you get money AND free input from the community. Sure there will be competing products that base on your code but look at the distro vendors. SuSe, Canonical, RedHat they all use more or less the same code and sell their specific very individual solutions.
I can imagine what would happen if programmers were no longer bound to huge companies by NDAs and Non-Compete agreements and all code was open: We'd get a shit ton of awesome code to work with and all the brilliant results stemming from there.
The difficult part is to change the perception of open source from the one like yours "Everything is free as in Beer and the brewer goes broke" to "Everything is free as in speech and you get paid for the quality and sustainability of your work". I wouldn't mind having companies go broke that re-release the same product year after year with little to no improvements. If there are other companies that do the job better and improve over time I guess it would only be fair. The current market is based on monopolism and power struggle between the monopolies. That's what has to change for FOSS to succeed and we need to start in the heads.
Re:Yeah.To answer a request for bid... (Score:3, Interesting)
The summary goes something like this:
This Whitehouse Administration is seeking a x86-64 64 bit computer operating system (OS) that is free of cumbersome and expensive licensing issues, can be secured and is not vulnerable to Windows security flaws, and which the Whitehouse Administration IT department can view, modify, and re-issue the source code in compiled form. ....
Well, open source generally isn't free. Some one else generally pays for it somewhere. I do think that it is 30-40 years past to do this though. The government "pays" for tons of software development just for it. There should be a push from top down that every spec that the feds push out to contractors makes the source, apis, file formats, all open as far as the government is concerned. If they pay your company 10 million and they turn in a half assed product, well instead of spending another $30 million at the same place trying to fix things, you could have other contractors fix it in theory.
The government is still paying for development to be done somewhere by some one, but this time it knows to either own or open up the code, file formats, and APIs needed to get multiple contractors to work on it without being tied to any of them. That's the real benefit of open source to government. Of course, if the feds or states really wanted to be nasty or evil, they could just pass a law that said any software that the government runs has to turn over the source and be modifiable by the government. If the government really wants something, they can and will use eminent domain to take it away from those that currently "own" it.
Re:A better first step (Score:1, Interesting)
One would have to be completely immersed in anti-Israel prejudice in order not to see that if there is one country in the world that values and cherishes the prosperity and security of the U.S. as much or more than U.S. itself, it's Israel.
If by "values and cherishes the prosperity and security of the U.S." you mean "enjoys receiving massive amounts of US taxpayers dollars and stealing state secrets from its 'host' country", I'd would agree with you entirely.
Re:Open source has been "looked at" (Score:2, Interesting)
Open Source Governance? (Score:1, Interesting)
So what are the chances he will examine the prospects of open source governance [wikipedia.org]?
Perhaps by the end of his administration, he will step down in order to cede power to the Metagovernment [metagovernment.org]? (Assuming a constitutional convention, that is.) :)
I just want public versioning of laws (Score:1, Interesting)
Let's make these people really accountable for their actions by making them use git to track, where all the public can see, exactly who put what into what version of what bill, who signed it off, all of it verifiable, with commit messages explaining the change and why it was made.
Of course such a system would be violently opposed, because git sucks.
Re:McNealy? (Score:3, Interesting)
All that looks good except I'm curious why you would choose MSSQL. Did you consider PostgreSQL in your quest for pragmatism? Was it features, reliability, ease of use or something else?
Just curious.
Re:Fear, confusion, curiosity, consequence (Score:1, Interesting)
It's not fearsome at all. It just means "exit program".
B8 = mov ax, (following 2 bytes) "Put some stuff into the AX register"
00 4C = The stuff you put into AX, in little endian format = 4C00. This means AH (A - High) register becomes 4C and AL (A - Low) becomes 00.
CD = int (following byte) "Trigger interrupt"
21 = The interrupt number.
So to summarize:
Put 4C into AH, 00 into AL, then trigger interrupt 21 (hex).
21 is the DOS interrupt handler, which reads the operation number from AH upon being invoked.
4C is the code for the "Terminate with return code" operation, with return code in AL.
So in plain english:
"Terminate with return code zero."
Re:Open source has been "looked at" (Score:5, Interesting)
That $600 toilet seat was the best for the job too (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure the military got great value on their $600 toilet seats. An excretory experience second to none. But if you're asking me to foot the bill, your ass can sit on the $19.95 job.
While 'the best tool for the job' might actually provide a little extra productivity for a power user, forcing the entire population to use an expensive tool to write the occasional memo will counteract any such gains pretty quickly.
Ideally, they'd demand a fully-compliant ODF office suite and then have the choice to give high-volume users a slightly better tool if they need it. But locking everyone into MS proprietary file formats throws that option out the window.
Scott Mcnealy? (Score:3, Interesting)
I certainly have a great deal of respect for Mr. Mcnealy, but I'm not sure that includes expecting him to objectively comment on MS's competition.
I anxiously await his analysis. :-)
Re:McNealy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you ever read William James? I ask not only because of your incorrect statement about science and faith but because James is the man who came up with Pragmatism, and Obama is continually referred to as a pragmatist (in the historical rather than the pejorative sense). It is in our interest, then, to re-examine Pragmatism if we are to fully understand the decisions that President Obama will make, provided that he does in fact use the pragmatic test of truth. This isn't the place for such an undertaking and I don't have any books handy, so instead I will only tackle your statement, "that science doesn't require any blind faith," using a smattering of quotes from William James.
Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.
It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true.
The statement in the second quote is especially important when considering science. When a scientist posits a hypothesis, he believes it to be true, or that there is a good chance that it is true. This faith, based on his previous experience, is what compels him to run experiments to test his hypothesis, which may turn out to be true or false. More fundamentally, he has faith that by experimenting he will be able to prove or disprove his hypothesis, or at least discover whether or not it is provable at this time, even though the only thing he has to go on is his personal experience.
Our faith is faith in someone else's faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.
Here we see that faith plays a role in science at a greater than individual level. Repeatability is well and good as a test, but one must have faith that testing was actually performed as reported, and accurate results obtained. A better example, perhaps, is when we accept the word of geologists that the rock in a certain area is X million years old. This statement is based on the faith that the geologist knows what he is about, and on his part, faith that the methods used by his testing equipment are sound, and so on. You also have faith that the scientific process will continue to yield practical results; otherwise what would be the point? "In its most extreme form, scientism is the faith that science has no boundaries, that in due time all human problems and all aspects of human endeavor will be dealt and solved by science alone." (source: wiki::scientism [wikipedia.org])
You may complain that I have been discussing "faith" while what you wrote is "blind faith." The truth is that there are individuals who take the existence of God on blind faith, that is, solely on the faith of others, and there are other individuals who take the truths found by science on blind faith. Yet just as there are also individuals who take science on informed faith, that is, their own experimentation, so too are there individuals who believe in God based on informed faith. What informs them is their own spiritual* experience, and though that may never satisfy you it certainly satisfies them. It is the divergence of experience that explains why believing in God is an option for some and not for others; it is the same thing that allows you and I to see the same film at the same time in the same theater and come out with opposite opinions as to its worth.
Science tells us a lot about the universe in which we live; I do not intend to dispute that by pointing out the role that faith plays in science. I do not intend to defend any religion in particular, either, only to defend the option of choosing to follow a religion without being viewed as somehow inferior to or less intelligent than those who choose no religion.
One final message from James quite nicely sums up the difference between science and reality:
Knowledge about life is one t
Re:Oh rly? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not the OP and therefore I can't speak for him wrt what he meant; but if he read the same studies I read last week, and it sounds like he did, the "cost" refers exactly to what you're assuming it doesn't: vulnerabilities that are only closed too late; work-arounds for applications that don't do exactly what your company needs, for missing features, or simple bugs, that if you were using open source your IT team could correct in just a few hours; expensive boxes, and dead-tree manuals that nobody (ever!) opens; bribes and lobbying; money spent by the industry combating "software piracy"; the list goes on.
What it doesn't include, and IMO it should, is long-term costs, like loss of innovation due to semi-monopolies, indoctrination of the young by pushing Windows and Office to schools / Photoshop to college students, etc.