

Governments should not support open source - sovande
http://www.economist.com/node/17899970

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jbermudes
The article correctly points out that just because the software license is $0
doesn't mean that you can change an organization's entire IT infrastructure
for free. Proprietary vs open source TCO studies always tend to disagree
depending on who's funding the study, and that's ok. If you're $_MEGA_CORP
with an IT strategy that's working for you, there's no need to rock the boat.
Where open source really shines is in enabling the smaller guys to be able to
keep up with the bigger guys, and numbers-wise, there's a lot more of us
smaller guys which means that there will be a healthy open source ecosystem
for years to come.

I agree with the author that open standards are important, and if governments
can achieve that with proprietary software then that may be ok, but
unfortunately with the mess that was OOXML, I don't know if I can trust a
proprietary company like Microsoft to choose open standards when these open
standards make for less vendor lock-in as opposed to more.

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ZeroGravitas
Even though this research was funded by Microsoft, they don't seem to actually
be saying what the edited headline here is claiming.

Instead they bust "myths" like open source programmers not often being
employed/paid to do the work, or businesses using both open source and
proprietary software together.

All very boring, but I suppose someone has to put in the legwork to confirm
what anyone paying attention knows in some academicly respectable manner.

