Free Software Supporter and Canadian MP David Graham Talks OSS In Government (linux-magazine.com) 25
New submitter ShawnX writes: If David Graham sounds familiar, you might know him better as cdlu (short for "confused debian linux user"). For years, cdlu was my colleague at Linux.com and Newsforge and well-known in Debian circles as well. Since then, he has been a presence in the back rooms of the Liberal Party until, in the federal election in October 2015, he was elected for the first time. He now describes himself (no doubt correctly) as "the only Member of Parliament to be in the Debian key ring."
(And here's video of Graham discussing greater use of Open Source in government, from the perspective of someone with a foot in each of those worlds.)
Re:BAHAHA (Score:5, Informative)
GoC is a Microsoft house and always will be. They are so entrenched they write the RFCs to ensure they will always win
Would that be why the main gc.ca site runs Apache and OpenSSL on Linux, and why Revenue Canada had to shut down online filing for a few days when Heartbleed hit to upgrade systems? Incidentally, they also use Akamai CDN (which runs Linux) for load balancing.
Re: (Score:1)
GoC is a Microsoft house and always will be. They are so entrenched they write the RFCs to ensure they will always win
Would that be why the main gc.ca site runs Apache and OpenSSL on Linux, and why Revenue Canada had to shut down online filing for a few days when Heartbleed hit to upgrade systems? Incidentally, they also use Akamai CDN (which runs Linux) for load balancing.
Content delivery networks (CDNs) are third-party caching services and not under the control of the Government of Canada (GoC). The GoC is heavily infected by Microsoft with only a few niches relying on *nix. Most of the public service could easily perform their daily tasks on a thin-client desktop terminal with applications all written as web apps. The RFPs, not RFCs, are definitely slanted towards Microsoft and other perveyors of proprietary software.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a mixed bag, to be honest. On the server side there's a heavy Linux presence. On the desktop side, if you don't use or have access to a Windows box you're screwed. And with SSC interposing themselves in just about all IT decisions there's a high likelihood that it's going to get worse. The ETI (e-mail transformation initiativ
Flabbergasted - great news for Canada! (Score:3)
I've seen cdlu's comments for years and always respected his posts and insights. While I knew his name, I never connected the two.
Very nice to see that he's in a position to influence things in the Canadian government. Too bad there isn't a Ministry of Information Technology; it sound like Mr. Graham would be a great fit for the job.
Re:Flabbergasted - great news for Canada! (Score:5, Interesting)
Gobsmacked... (Score:3)
I can't believe I just heard a politician ask, in a government operations committee, about transitioning away from 32-bit signed integers. Just... wow.
It doesn't work like that (Score:1)
There is no problem with 32bit signed integers, there is a problem with programmers who provide computations that are useful at greater resolution than 32bits, but use code that assumes properties of 32bit signed integers. ... TL;DR: If you are asking about transitioning away from a prior standard, then you are probably not qualified to make decisions based on the best answer to said question.
If you worry about this to begin with, I imagine you are at least a fairly bright guy, but I also happen to think you're at least a bit off on this one.
First, because the promise of computing is fundamentally one of making things easier for people, including programmers. If things are easier and the mechanisms to make them easier are designed well, it becomes harder to mess things up and we become more efficient in the vast majority of our dealings. This premise isn't only one that applies to end-users, b
Canada ahead of the USA, Wow! (Score:5, Interesting)
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This is as likely as Trudeau actually legalizing Marijuana (IOW not likely but I would be pleasantly surprised)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, if Microsoft presses the government to legalize marijuana, the problem will solve itself. Everyone will be too stoned to give a shit.
Actually, those answers were kind of shocking (Score:4, Interesting)
I just retired from the City of Calgary, and damn, I thought we were having trouble keeping up. We, too, imagined that IE was your only tolerable browser -- up to a few years ago when they threw up their hands and started backing Chrome installs because people were installing it anyway in their home directories. Now it's taking over everything except a few apps that demand IE...and apps that do that are no longer considered for new purchases.
Calgary went all-Linux about 2004, making some waves in the trade journals at the time: we were getting (way) better performance with HP intel chips and RedHat than we had been with Solaris machines, for a fifth the cost(!) All proprietary Unixes were gone within a few years. And mainframes, I thought we were never going to ditch the mainframe, the whole IT department was built around it and they clung bitterly to that thing well into the 21st century...but it, too, has been gone for nearly 10 years now.
The notion that the Feds still have all that stuff so long after a slow-changing conservative municipal government ditched it is sobering, almost shocking.
They're really leaving a lot of money on the table!
FOSS is just one ingredient in the changes needed, and this MP needs to pick it as his signature topic and go after some of that "waste" that politicians are always promising to pay for new programs with - we've actually found some!
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Here's the 2004 story on it: http://www.itworldcanada.com/a... [itworldcanada.com] ...basically, they found that Intel+Linux processed Oracle as well as their Solaris boxes, at a fraction of the price-point. They remain the Oracle workhorses.
But not much else; they aren't application servers as a rule. File service is a huge NAT that provides for Windows, Linux and any other file space. And they have a pile of Windows servers, of course.
No Linux desktop, sorry, though a few Macs have made tentative re-appearances in graphi
Open File Formats (Score:4, Insightful)
Economic Sense (Score:2)
For governments of countries who generate no import revenue from software licensing, Free Open Source Software makes sense. In fact they can just turn around and invest that licence fee in Free Open Source Software to better tailor it to their needs and they are still enormously better off, having invested in the local development of computer skills and ensured any capital expenditure in fact does generate tax revenues. Considering the level of tax evasions amounting to trillions globally, spending money o