New Hampshire Passes 'Open Source Bill' 260
Plugh writes "In a victory for transparency and openness in government, and saving tax dollars, New Hampshire has passed HB418. State agencies are now required by law to consider open source software when acquiring software, and to promote the use of open data formats."
Re:I'm the legislator and prime sponsor, and autho (Score:4, Interesting)
I've got a slashdot UID of 5 digits, have contributed to the Linux kernel and other project, tech edited a book on Drupal, and been doing techy things for over 25 years now...
But have you ever (and I'm quite serious about this) worked on a government project where acquisitions are made, to understand the kind of "We'll get what we want, it's just a matter of the right amount of paperwork" shenanigans that go on? And as such, do you honestly think the CIO of any agency will actually care?
I'm also curious -- the legislation that others quoted doesn't make any mention of the size of the acquisition. Does this mean that every credit card purchase of software will require such justification to be sent to the CIO? And if so, do you honestly expect anything other than copy and paste boilerplate explanations that will be so numerous and repetitive as to be essentially meaningless?
Perhaps those issues are addressed, but to be honest, it seems like one of those "sounds like a great idea" measures that will increase the amount of paperwork that people have to get their jobs done, and at best will only provide some technical person a little bit of fodder to demonstrate to management that his suggestion to use some sort of free software to accomplish the task isn't completely off the mark.
Re:To what degree? (Score:3, Interesting)
LaTeX resumes are for people who graduated from MIT/Caltech or are otherwise celebrities in their fields and can coast by name alone.
Not knockin' LaTeX, just that resumes are not an ideal application of LaTeX.
Here I must respectfully disagree. LaTeX is ideal for a résumé. My own résumé is written in LaTeX and the layout is elegant and highly professional-looking. I output it to a pdf and send that when I'm able.
The thing that pisses me off is companies which require that I send a .doc or .docx formatted résumé. Where able, I politely request to send my résumé in pdf format, but it's not always an option. So therefore, I have a résumé in those formats, but the visual differences between the two are striking. Word looks frankly like shit.
To answer your other question, under Win7, you can activate what's called "US-International"keyboard under Control Panel --> keyboards and have a small icon in your bar that you can switch between US standard and US international. With US international active, all one has to do is type a ' character and it pauses waiting for another keypress. If the keypress is a letter like 'a' or 'e' then it'll produce that accented character à or é. When I use Win7, I usually keep it on US standard so I can type the quote marks with no trouble.
Re:Free State Project (Score:5, Interesting)
As the submitter of the story, I just want to make 3 points:
1. Seth Cohn [slashdot.org] is a prime sponsor of the bill, and a fairly hardcore slashdotter. J'raxis [slashdot.org] is, like myself, an emeritus Director of Research for the New Hampshire Liberty Alliance... and a fairly hardcore slashdotter.
Q: What happens when the geeks rule? A: New Hampshire, baby!
2. I learned about the Free State Project right here on slashdot, back in 2003. How cool is that?
3. This is for real. This is not just web slacktivism. This is people taking back control of the government. AND IT'S HAPPENING. If you have a vaguely libertarian bone in your body, you really do owe it to yourself to see what's going on in New Hampshire.
I'd strongly recommend coming to the NH Liberty Forum [freestateproject.org]. People come every year, and after the experience, go back to their home states. Just long enough... to pack! [youtube.com]
Enforcing the Law (or Policy) (Score:5, Interesting)
About 8 years ago, my employer adopted a policy which favored open standards and open source software. Today the site license for Microsoft products like Office and Exchange continues to rule as one administrator's secretary adopts a new version of Office and proceeds to distribute data in the new default format which is incompatible with previous versions so everyone upgrades because its easier than learning that Open/Libre Office can handle .docx and .xlsx files or using a Save As to ensure backward compatibility. Acess remains a problem as the stand-alone "database" file continues as the default.
The increasing number of Mac and *nix users learn to deal with the new file format but the new version virus always spreads because no one will enforce the policy and damn few people understand that there are alternatives.