FOSS and the election

[Tony Abou-Assaleh]

Is anyone here involved in some way with the Green Party? In particular,
I'd like to know if they have specific facts to back up this policy. DRDC
has conducted an extensive research on FOSS and made an 'informed'
recommendation to all GOV departments to 'consider' using FOSS and
commercial software alike, and choose what fits their needs (as opposed to
considering only commercial software, which is what most departments tend
to do).

One needs to keep in mind that Free in FOSS refers to choice and not cost.
There is a cost associated with using FOSS, and in many cases it may
exceed the costs of commercial software.

Do you guys know a person up the hierarchy at the Green Party who can give
an informative talk about FOSS and politics?

Cheers,

TAA

-----------------------------------------------------
Tony Abou-Assaleh
Lecturer, Computer Science Department
Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada, L2S 3A1
Office: MC J215
Tel:    +1(905)688-5550 ext. 5243
Fax:    +1(905)688-3255
Email:  taa-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org
WWW:    http://www.cosc.brocku.ca/~taa/
----------------------[THE END]----------------------

On Thu, 22 Dec 2005, Evan Leibovitch wrote:

> FYI:
>
> I don't know whether anyone here considers open source to be important
> enough of a public policy matter to consider it an election issue, but
> consider this: The Green Party actually has as specific policy the
> goal to:
>
> > Require federal departments and agencies to transition to open
> > source or free software for general applications, and provide free
> > tech support to Canadian companies who also use this software.
>
> http://www.greenparty.ca/article38.html
>
> I searched for anything on the other party websites and found nothing
> in terms of policy. The Liberals only talk about more university R&D
> funds and the Conservatives seem to ignore technology altogether. The
> NDP doesn't say anything as a party, but are running one candidate in
> Manitoba who lists "FOSS advocate" in his bio:
> http://www.ndp.ca/mathieuallard/welcome
>
> Other notes: The Liberal site uses Microsoft ASP to run its "find your
> candidate" facility, the Conservatives use PHP and the NDP site uses
> Javascript.
>
> - Evan
>
> --
> The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
> TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
> How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml
>
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml