On 7/19/06, jan gestre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
why oppose the bill, its not even crafted yet, if it would help to promote the use of FOSS then great, if not fine, at least the distinguish gentleman tried, right? look at the bright side, once this bill reached the floor for deliberation, it will gain publicity and in turn more and more people will be aware of FOSS. ain't that great
Well, most probably because I'd rather do it some other way -- the publicity part. See, publicity is the last thing Open Source Software (I don't care too much about "Free Software" anymore) needs right now: what it needs is more contributions and more maturity IMO. Word of mouth works somehow, but the industry and the developers have to pick it up first and improve it to the point of "marketability" -- more users of the software would be nice, but that's not what's really needed right now. Some software might be argued "market ready" like OpenOffice, Mozilla [Firefox,Thunderbird], GIMP, etc. but the ones the government needs are the ones that _aren't_ out there yet -- and that's what needs to get done _first_ before we even start thinking about publicity. If the bill is about publicity, then I don't think that's a good way to spend tax payers' hard earned money -- I'd rather see real issues get tackled instead of promotion of open source in congress. My $0.02 worth. -- Dean Michael C. Berris C/C++ Software Architect Orange and Bronze Software Labs http://3w-agility.blogspot.com/ http://cplusplus-soup.blogspot.com/ Mobile: +639287291459 Email: dean [at] orangeandbronze [dot] com _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
