First of all, I don't think it was ever suggested that we turn into a hippie advocacy group, rather that you may want to find out how much your elected officals know about and what they think about Linux and free software. IMHO municipal politics is a load of crap anyways.
> 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? Find out. From what I know the city has converted lots of their old Unix systems to Linux, but I don't think they have converted any of their Windows systems to Linux. From what I know, the wheels are not turning on their own. I haven't heard anything about free software from the provincial government but I do know that the feds did a number of studies on the matter. This is probably just more wasted tax dollars though, and I don't think anything good ever came of that. I would have to suppose that they wouldn't have spend a billion dollars on the gun regestry database if it was open source though. > * 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. Schools are a bit of a different animal. Yes they get discounts, but it's not free. As for TCO that would depend on who's studies you choose to research. > * 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? We are not here to promote IBM's, Novells, or anyone elses software solutions. We're here to promote Linux and open source software. > 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. You're welcome to try and set something up with the approval of the executive. Other than that I think that CLUE does more advocacy so you could get involved with them if you are interested. As for the previous posts, there was a suggestion that some people may be interested in finding the opinions of the people they are voting for, and some more reasons why we as taxpayers may actually care, nothing more. Jesse _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
