[ILUG] email sent to potiticians about Mary Hannafin's decision not to use open source

[Timothy Murphy]

On Monday 03 May 2004 12:22, James McCarthy wrote:

>**** Mary Hannafin has decided not to use open source software
> (software in which anyone can look at the code)
> she has decided to use what is called open standards
> (in short she has decided to stay using MicroSoft products)

While I strongly favour Open Source
(and never use Windows personally)
I don't think Mary Hanafin's decision is quite as bad as you think,
provided Open Standards means "standards approved by some international body".
That would mean, for example, that documents could not be provided 
in .doc format, but would have to be in XML,
in a form which could be edited by anyone.

It seems to be that if such rules were strictly adhered to
then Linux-based companies would be in a good position to tender
for public contracts.

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland