On 13 Aug 2002, mark wrote:
> The Canadian Federal Government has a history of listening to vocal > minorities from time to time as long as big business doesn't pull their > purse strings the other way. If the case can be made that this is "the right thing to do", there is a chance to move forward. I believe we should not underestimate the effect we are having - it's not so much a "vocal minority", but a minority who don't seem to be a special interest group and who seem to be speaking on behalf of a majority. The Intellectual Monoply lobby is slowly being seen as a special interest group. The "soft on corporate crime" lobby (IE: Those who think the GoC should still be purchasing Microsoft products) is being seen as a special interest group....etc > Yet a Canadian version of the DMCA has been talked about. The copying > tax on blank media raised. The DMCA was talked about - but we don't have a DMCA, and all reports I have been given from Government bureaucrats is that we won't have one. If anything, the DMCA's flaws are very visable and other countries outside of the USA are solidifying very different laws. > I also heard a year or so ago that the Canadian government had set a > policy that this windows (occasionally unix) encryption package was to > be used for secure email. This is even being looked into, with the Entrust package being tested under Windows Emulators for use on Linux desktops. There is also already talk of dumping this product in the future once standardized tools are available that will do the same thing cross-platform. > Yet linux is making in roads into government and educational research. > Hugh CFI grants are going to Universities to purchase Beowulf clusters. > Government research labs buy Linux Servers and Samba file servers > because they get more bang for their buck. > > So the article is right about making a better product. It does work. What bothered me about the article is that it didn't recognize that both are needed. One group needs to continue to make a better product, while another continues marketing&advocacy to ensure those products are both visable to government as well as ensuring that government doesn't make these products (or techqniques like reverse-engineering required to produce the producs) illegal. All the out-there Libertarian views aside, I doubt there are many Open Source programmers that are willing to actually go to jail to be allowed to write Open Source software. There are those who will be willing, but those are exactly the same people doing the government lobbying now - not the ones saying we need to concentrate only on writing code. I also think people need to recognize the inroads we are making. I've spent about 10 years advocating for Free Softwre now, but the audience has increased greatly in the last year. We are being heard, and even small submissions made by us are having a huge impact. --- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> See http://weblog.flora.ca/ for announcements, activities, and opinions Submission to Innovation Strategy | No2Violence in Politics http://www.flora.ca/innovation-2002.shtml | http://www.no-dot.ca/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
