Let's not embarrass ourselves (CLUG and it's members) by getting into advocacy without knowing the pertinent facts, defining a sensible strategy and being highly organized.
For example:
* do we know the IT / FLOSS strategy of either organization? Wouldn't it be counterproductive to create a political issue, when there doesn't need to be one, because the wheels are turning nicely already?
* do we know the cost structure of either IT budget? i.e. before making any X is cheaper than Y arguments, better have the facts straight; for example, in the educational world, MS has a lot of very low pricing, so playing the cost card maybe rather silly, and set the cause back by years. Maybe the argument needs to be educational merit of open source rather than cost. Maybe the argument needs to be "submit your homework with open standards, rather than proprietary one's (like submit PDF, not MS Word files.) I don't know, because I don't have enough data. Before I would offer an opinion, I would do a lot more homework (pun not intended!) to get better data.
* do we know what companies like IBM, Novell and others are already doing on the FLOSS front with the IT departments of those organizations? And believe me, if they do, they are much more organized about it, than calling non-technical candidates for public office a few days before the election with some simplistic "Linux is great" rhetoric. If CLUG is toying with the thought of getting into that, maybe we should ask those organizations, what (if anything) useful CLUG could do?
I could go on for quite a while, but will refrain ...
Advocacy without proper preparation on facts, without long term strategy, positioning and planning, without creating proper alliances doesn't make any sense, and more often than not will set the cause back.
So I would propose, if we/CLUG want to get into the advocacy game, let's do it right (with the appropriately serious time and effort), or not do it at all.
</rant>
...Niels
p.s. flame away :)
Curtis Rempel wrote:
On Wed, 2004-10-13 at 00:04, Jesse Kline wrote:
I just wanted to note, that as taxpayers this can be a fairly important issue. I don't think it matters if our elected officials have a firm stance on the ideological issues surrounding free software, but they should be made aware of what is out there so that our tax dollars are not wasted on expensive software solutions that could be accomplished at a much lower cost using technologies such as Linux.
Jesse
Actually, the City of Calgary is heavily involved with Linux and has been for some time now. The following snippet is from their website:
Switching to Linux means even better value for taxpayer money
spent on technology.
The City has recently moved to the Linux operating system, and
is already saving a whopping 75 percent on computer server
hardware and related costs. Plus, some important computer
transactions can be done 200 to 500 percent faster than on the
old systems. I have done Linux training for the city and know that reps have spoken
publicly at various venues regarding their Linux journey, one of the
most prominent ones was at the last Real World Linux in Toronto.
I was at a Calgary Unix Users Group meeting about six months back where
the IT manager was a guest speaker and spoke about their Linux efforts. Perhaps this might be a topic for an upcoming CLUG meeting? If there is
interest, I could make the appropriate inquiries.
Curtis
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