I just posted this to the MITI website:
In an article entitled "Accord widens e-Government infrastructure
capabilities" in the Times of Malta dated 26/1/2006 and available
online at
http://www.timesofmalta.com/core/article.php?id=212673&hilite=accord,
there was a mention of open source as follows:
"The alliance with Oracle is consistent with the government's policy to
expand the e-Government framework to open source technologies."
My questions are:
1) Did the author intend 'open systems' as opposed to 'open source'?
2) Please indicate where these policies as I do not know of any?
3) How will a company based on proprietary software help MITI to achieve
this policy?
If the answer to the first is in the positive, then the author has to be
informed that open systems and open source are not the same and under no
circumstances can be interchanged. Open systems refer to the capability
of data interchange and protocol compliance between diverse operating
systems regardless if these systems are open source or proprietary. Open
Source refers to the availability to freely access, change and
re-distribute the code with which the software is written.
Furthermore, when searching for 'open source' from your web site, the
following error was displayed on the screen.
Server Error in '/' Application.
Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current
custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the
application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It
could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server
machine.
Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be
viewable on remote machines, please create a <customErrors> tag within a
"web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the
current web application. This <customErrors> tag should then have its
"mode" attribute set to "Off".
<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->
<configuration>
<system.web>
<customErrors mode="Off"/>
</system.web>
</configuration>
Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom
error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the
application's <customErrors> configuration tag to point to a custom
error page URL.
<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->
<configuration>
<system.web>
<customErrors mode="RemoteOnly"
defaultRedirect="mycustompage.htm"/>
</system.web>
</configuration>
Why would a search for 'open source' be considered a security breach? It
seems to work when I search the word "proprietary" quoting the
abovementioned article as one of its results.
On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 10:21 +0100, Keith Vassallo wrote:
> Are you sure it's The Times? I've looked through it and can't find
> anything. I did find it on The Independent though.
>
> Keith
>
> On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 08:18 +0100, Ramon Casha wrote:
> > In an unprecedented development, an article in The Times today mentions the
> > Ministry for Investment, IT and something else that begins with I, and Open
> > Source Software, in the same article. Could this be a sign of things to
> > come?
> >
> > The article itself is about an Accord between Oracle and MITI.
> >
> > Ramon Casha
> > chairman - Malta Linux User Group
> >
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--
Andrew Cilia B.Sc. RHCE MCSE ICSE
Senior Software Consultant
Philip Toledo Limited
Computer & Communications Solutions
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