This article well clarifies Bruce Perens' Sincere Choice initiative, showing how he is opposed to CompTIA's Software Choice that pushes to lock open source out of government in the name of "fairness".
http://www.idg.com.hk/cw/readstory.asp?aid=20021018003 Open source advocate Bruce Perens, who last month left Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) after announcing his desire to become more active in promoting open source software, took an aggressive stand Thursday against Computing Technology Industry Association's "software choice" campaign, saying it does not promote fairness, as CompTIA claims, and would lock open source software out of the government marketplace. CompTIA has "carefully crafted a message that appears to call for fairness while actually supporting policy that would retain the status quo of a strong bias toward proprietary software," Perens said during a panel discussion at a conference here on the use of open source software by governments. "They explicitly call for public entities to blind themselves to the merits of one intellectual property policy over another and they have the nerve to call that fairness." ... "The saddest thing about CompTIA's efforts is that an 8,000-company organization allows itself to, in effect, become a mouthpiece for the vision of a single vendor," Perens said. "The other side doesn't find a real choice acceptable because on a sincerely level-playing field, open source would win most decisions." ... The [Software Choice] initiative's backers are alarmed over the more than 70 proposals calling for governments to buy open source software in 24 countries, including many that mandate open source software and exclude proprietary software from the worldwide multibillion dollar government marketplace, Kramer said. (continued in article)
