The press article reports that neither of the major Australian political parties plan to introduce affirmative action legislation for FOSS in this respect - so it has to compete on its own merits (including purchase price).An issue is the playing field of merits. Past behavior and to some extent regulation, legislation, standards and standard practice influence the playing field of merits. I suspect that influence is to the detriment of free and open source software because it is such a fundamentally different approach in various areas such as:
economic beneficiaries of intellectual property; engineering practices; standards setting activities; power and influence networks.
Some work on the belief systems of the meritocracy which finds itself embedded in a pervasive global bureaucracy might be interesting in relationship to all of the above.
I say this because many scientists, engineers and technical people in the west believe themselves to be part of a meritocracy.
This leads to fundamental beliefs that better ideas win out over inferior ideas, and when they don't the cognitive dissonance yields much hand wringing and special exception making....
-- Wayne Wilson An attachment containing my pgp-signature is included. My public key fingerprint is: 9325 05AD 866B BCCB 45BF E86A 63E1 C6ED 4130 5461 My public key can be downloaded from wwwkeys.us.pgp.net
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