I agree with Warren 100% on this one. It is silly to say that open source would be competing on its own merits if you force everyone to use it. That's a dictatorship of sorts. Its like saying Sadam Housein is a great leader because he is *the* leader of Iraq. Open source may at that point compete against other open source products, but it is possible that there are some products that need corporate sponsorship in order to develop. Banning the competition does not make you the most qualified candidate. I'm sure you could argue that if the legislation did in fact pass, it would be because open source were already proven to be superior. But without properly qualifying and argument like that, the legislation would simply be forcing the govt. to use a particular solution, not necessarily the best. Ask yourself if the government was mandated to use IIS, would that be because IIS was a strong competetor on its own merit?
-Eric Hattemer On Sun, 13 Oct 2002 06:51:08 -1000, "R. Scott Belford" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > On Saturday 12 October 2002 10:25 pm, Jimen Ching wrote: > > On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, R. Scott Belford wrote: > > >or Openly Sourced. It would be an equal shame to see OpenSourceAdvocates > > >fail to take their message to the free market and allow it to compete on > > > its merits. > > > > Can either you or Warren explain how these legislation prevent Open Source > > or Free Software from competing on their merits? > > I can't because it doesn't. I can say that efforts on such legislation > are > wasted. These efforts would be, as my post attempted to state, better > used > advocating Open Source software in the private sector. > > scott > _______________________________________________ > LUAU mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/luau > -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://fastmail.fm/ - IMAP accessible web-mail