06.28.11
Without GNU/Linux or BSD as a Platform, There Can be No Freedom
Summary: Microsoft FUD in Peru (against GNU/Linux, as usual) and a move towards Free software on Windows hits an impasse
“Some FUD from some Peruvian MS minions” called it Eduardo Landaveri, a key member of this site, who shows that FUD is up to its older ‘mode’ again, which no good (we wrote about Peru before). We really ought to make a video roundup of the evolution of Microsoft FUD. “It’s an interview [with] Alejandro Raffaele,” explains the source, “director de marketing de Red Hat in that country. Of course he’s supporting his company’s views but you could see that some people especially on third world countries still believe old FUD, like GNU/Linux has higher TCO, less secure, and the like… It seems that the awareness is getting a foothold in those countries but still we have to engage in counter[ing] it and setting the facts straight.” Here is the Google translation of this article.
According to a pointer sent to us from India, Geneva too, having decide to put Free software only on top of Windows (a strategic mistake Bristol had made too), decided to withdraw from it:
The IT department of the city of Geneva in Switzerland is about to stop its four-year use of open source email clients and OpenOffice, an open source suite of office productivity tools, and revert to the previous, vendor dependent solutions, reports osor.eu.
Mathias Buschbeck, member of the the city council for the Greens, is submitting written questions to the mayor, arguing in favour of the current, vendor independent IT strategy and against the switch to proprietary solutions
To quote OSOR’s article about it, “Geneva [is] abandoning its open source email and office strategy” (on a proprietary platform). The yardsticks are already biased unless the software runs on its intended platform which Microsoft does not control and discriminate on, e.g. performance-wise.
I am currently working on IMAP patches (in C) that would add functionality public services may need. The problem is that they want to emulate what Microsoft is doing rather than adhere to standard Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), for example. █
