__/ [ Mark Kent ] on Sunday 02 April 2006 21:54 \__
> begin oe_protect.scr
> Roy Culley <rgc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
>> begin risky.vbs
>> <he2dnedBXt0mfbLZRVny2A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
>> Gordon <gordon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>>> Mark Kent wrote:
>>>
>>>> That is £1M of taxpaper's cash too, which is a terribly important
>>>> point, frequently lost/ignored. A few more deals like that, and we
>>>> could start to see a reduction in Council Tax, which would be
>>>> fantastic.
>>>
>>> You must be joking! They'll just find something else to spend it
>>> on......
>>
>> Not only that, they'll probably reduce the budget for schools because
>> IT infrastructure costs are lower. It would be nice to think the money
>> saved would still be spent on education but I doubt it.
>
> I've not looked at what our Council's IT budget is, but I expect it
> could well be in the multi-millions, so a substantial saving could be
> possible. After that, it's politics as to what happens next ;-)
To 'return a favour' back to this financial contributer, the city could
employ many dozens (if not hundreds) of *paid* Open Source developers who
would extend the software (e.g. self-tailoring) and make the fruits of it
publicly available.
Novell and other brands seem to take this approach. Look at virtualisation,
OpenOffice macros and XGL for example. The gist: get free kernel, desktop
environments, and applications and, in turn, enhance these at the expense of
your budgets/earnings. I quite like the OpenSuSE approach -- the
collaboration between paid executive/investors and the 'lamers' (
http://www.answers.com/topic/lamer ) or startups. This drives technology
forward more quickly (re-use) and prevents lockins (patents, secrets, and
capitalisation)
Best wishes,
Roy
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | Windows O/S: who ownZ you tod4y?
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE Linux ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
10:10pm up 25 days 11:53, 12 users, load average: 0.44, 0.75, 0.83
http://iuron.com - next generation of search paradigms
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