[MLUG] government computing

[Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Tue, 6 Nov 2007, Jonathan King wrote:

> This makes my work situation right now pretty much worst case: XP with 
> IE6 and Office 2007. XP doesn't really do anything to help matters, but 
> it's the fact that I have like 10 (unidentifiable) browser windows to 
> alt-Tab through and also a bunch of Office documents...it's just 
> completely broken. Then, within Office 2007, Outlook blows off my Word 
> macros, so I don't even have decent editing keybindings.  It's really 
> ugly.


The US government should be making an effort to support Open Source or 
"Free Software."  It is in the interest of the people for our government 
to do so.  Policy should reflect at least an interest in moving in that 
direction.  Federal grants could help FOSS developers, but I imagine that 
won't happen because the software big-wigs will cry "foul play."

It would be nice if we could somehow get this issue on the radar screen at 
NIH or NSF or somewhere.  Or maybe it is already being discussed.  Next we 
would want some kind of congressional support.  Why should the people's 
money be used to create products that are not freely available to the 
people?  The publication issue got good support (people should have free 
access to published results of NIH research), and this is not different.

Mike

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