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GNU is Not Unix Government Politics

Open Source in Politics? 68

Posted by Cliff from the a-gnu-platform dept.
tetraminoe asks: "Spread Firefox has a story about a student at the University of Florida running for student government promising to promote open source on campus. His platform includes expanding F/OSS on campus, using open file formats, etc. Is this the first time 'free culture' has become an electoral issue? Has anyone else made open source an issue at their university?"
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Open Source in Politics? More

Open Source in Politics?

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  • It's a non-issue (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BadAnalogyGuy ( 945258 ) <BadAnalogyGuy@gmail.com> on Monday February 27, 2006 @11:32PM (#14814240)
    The real issues are tuition, professor quality, library resources, and campus safety (wide net encompassing dorm safety to the campus rentacops). Open Source is just a buzzword that gets play with a very narrow circle of jerks that think they know what's best.

    Besides, Open Source ought to be about freedom, which would mean that it should be as far away from politics as possible to ensure that everyone has the Freedom to choose whatever software they liked. Now, if the "IT director" in the computer labs wants to screw everyone over by installing a minority OS on all the campus computer lab PCs, that's an IT decision. It ought not be handled at the student government level.
    • You've got some sense, son.
      • Well, please cast your vote for me. I'm running on the "My opponent is stupid and so are all of his supporters".

        Why yes, I am a Democrat. Why do you ask?
      • My school distributes a disk containing firefox and thunderbird (as well as some utilities most people never touch like putty) to all entering students. Next year that package will also include gaim so that people can interface with the jabber server they are pulling out of testing next quarter.

        The lab systems and such all run office and such but its not like they pay for it as stated by another poster. There are tons of sun thin clients displaying what looks like a windowmaker desktop running mozilla/f

    • Re:It's a non-issue (Score:4, Insightful)

      by oirtemed ( 849229 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2006 @12:14AM (#14814447)
      I beg to differ. Open source is a real issue. My school spends millions of dollars on MS contracts and has to upgrade their contracted Dell computers all the time just to keep pace. While Windows and other prop programs are needed, there is no reason that many of the workstations couldn't be switched over to linux. We have workstations dedicated solely to catalog lookups for the library. I would love to see the MS tax be eliminated there, all it needs is a web browser to run and MS support isn't needed on those machines. I would also sleep better at night knowing my personal information wasn't kept, most likely, on windows machines.

      I use openoffice and have never ONCE had a problem moving a document between here and the Word2000/MS machines at school. This tells me that there could be room for an alternative, especially when computer seats are so expensive. You could take dated hardware and convert them to word processing/web browsing stations for cheap.

      I don't know why I'm wasting my time with you, you are an obvious troll. Academic institutions are the places where freedom SHOULD be pushed. Open document standards should be the norm. This doesn't mean no MS machines at all. But there is room for OSS there. It's only a non-issue for those who can't wrap their heads around concepts like freedom, cost savings and portability. And freedom is a political issue. I suggest you take a class and learn what politics really are.

      • "Academic institutions are the places where freedom SHOULD be pushed."

        Your statement that "freedom should be pushed" pretty much captures the essense of "free" software's idealistic double-speak.
      • "...freedom SHOULD be pushed..."

        You sound like Stallman. Would society be freer if everyone were forced to remove their front doorlocks?

      • Re:It's a non-issue (Score:4, Insightful)

        by queenb**ch ( 446380 ) on Tuesday February 28, 2006 @01:33AM (#14814723) Homepage Journal
        First off, your university doesn't spend squat on Microsoft products. Seriously, Microsoft gives them to us. I should know, since I'm in IT for a university.

        You know what a per seat license for Microsoft Office Pro costs at the educational rate? $6.00 and no, that's not a typo. It's 6 bucks, which is usually cheaper than my lunch on campus. Now that's if I want the disks. If I just want a license, it isn't even a whole $1. Retail for the same product is $450 per seat.

        You know how much the license is for Windows XP? Well, there is no "per seat" charge. We pay a few hundred bucks a year for the right to install it on as many University owned machines as we can. Retail for it is nearly $200 per seat.

        All of the other Microsoft products are priced similarly for education. The whole reason being that if they are cheap enough, we will use them and crank you out already assimilated. Welcome to the collective.

        If you want to whinge about Microsoft's TCO to a Universtiy, whinge where it will do some good. Complain about the additional costs of anti-virus "solution", the anti-spyware "solution", the patch management "solution", the anti-spam "solution" etc. Since *none* of these products come from Microsoft, we pay out the a$$ with your tuition dollars to cover them. That's what you ought to be mad about!

        Frankly, even at an initially higher purchase price, we'd be better off if everyone had a Mac. Still runs most of the proprietary software, runs Office for Mac, and doesn't need any of the above to remain in good working order 99+% of the time.

        2 cents,

        Queen B

        • >> First off, your university doesn't spend squat on Microsoft products.
          >> Seriously, Microsoft gives them to us. I should know,
          >> since I'm in IT for a university.

          Doesn't the fact of the unequal cost, in comparison to what home and smb/business users pay, directly drive what you in IT can do about choice of tools? By which I mean that executive decision-making based on subsidized price-model must surely belay any expense or change.

          I would guess that the only way this could change is in t
        • First off, your university doesn't spend squat on Microsoft products. Seriously, Microsoft gives them to us. I should know, since I'm in IT for a university.

          The parent is not Insightful its a troll.

          MS gives it to you to grow its' monopoly. They learned this from Apple.

          Education should prepare the student for the future. It might be, IMHO, But MS is the past. I would never send a student off with MS or a Mac. Both are proprietary software, that at best can only cope with the most general types

      • there is no reason that many of the workstations couldn't be switched over to linux.

        Other than lack of budget to replace hardware that has no working Linux driver?

        • We're not talking about home PC's here, with people wanting to plug in their latest printer, scanner, webcam, or other USB gadget. In a university computer labe or library sitation the only hardware concern might be the network and graphics cards. But Realtek network cards/chips are pretty common and well supported under Linux, and graphics support under Linux/XFree86/Xorg is much better now than it used to be. An old generic card will do in most cases, for media labs (3D, etc) put in some nice nVidia cards

          • In a university computer labe or library sitation the only hardware concern might be the network and graphics cards.

            I'm not necessarily talking about a well-funded university; I'm talking about K-12 public school computer labs, which tend to be more cobbled together.

            An old generic [2D video] card will do in most cases

            But is the video card in the donated machines a supported "old generic card"?

            So where's this great cost of which you speak?

            Scanners, for one thing. Graphics tablets. If you want

      • At UMBC all the lab computers dual boot to their own Linux which is pretty much Fedora. Granted we are probably one of the most geeky universities in the country. Go Chess!
      • You also forget to point out that the failure of these institutions to promote open source software and solutions effectively eliminates choice from the students, forcing them down the M$ purchasing path during their time at the university and compounding that with the educational commitment in latter life for that student to continue paying M$ tax or spend time and personal cost in re-learning the system that will dominate, Open Office etc..

        Free/discounted copies for university staff should not be the dr

    • They can lobby the state government over tuition, which might do some good, although the higher-ups are already doing that. They have less influence then the faculty senate, so it's unlikely they can do anything about professor quality. Libraries and campus safety are probably reasonable things to focus on, but in most cases, there's only so much student government can do, for good or ill. At my school (we're talking 2000-2004) the Black Caucus alone was more politically powerful than the undergraduate sena
    • The real issues are tuition, professor quality, library resources, and campus safety (wide net encompassing dorm safety to the campus rentacops). Open Source is just a buzzword that gets play with a very narrow circle of jerks that think they know what's best.

      As one of the people who was popular enough to get elected to student government (first a student Senator, then Treasurer in charge of $millions), I can safely say that nobody outside of the CS department here gives a rat's ass about Open Source softwa

      • All good points, but most of your points can be addressed with F/OSS. I'm not claiming every problem/issue can be addressed with Free and Open Source software. But here are some suggestions.

        • Accessability. You know that there are many groups around the world that recycle old PC's, load them up them up with Linux and other F/OSS, and donate them to underpriviledged people. This could work in a university/college situation.
        • Diversity. Do non-MS users count as a group to encourage? Seriously. I tried to go
    • There should be a range of operating systems/browsers as this will aid education. Open source to open student's eyes to alternative software but M$ too so that when they get a job they can use the software that their employer probably uses!

      In the UK, schools/colleges previously used bespoke hardware/software solutions to teach IT which were of questionable value when faced with a computer in a real work environment.
  • At my school, it is generally accepted that OSS is good, and Microsoft is bad. I really don't understand -- you can ask anybody at school, they will all say that Microsoft is bad. That's great -- they should think that -- but they don't know why.

    Although, all of computing is Apple based...

  • You Gotta Be Kidding (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You think a kid running for STUDENT government at a college really means something larger because of his Open Source platform?

    I mean, really, please get a grip here. Most student governments are jokes anyways, people will run on any wacky platform to get a few meager votes from the student population.

    If this was an REAL election, you might have a story. But this is like reporting on a Model UN or Boy Scout meeting. In other words, it's completely meaningless.

  • Zero Power (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Secret Rabbit ( 914973 )
    Considering that a student has zero power to dictate the technologies on campus, I'd say that this is nothing but an attempt to get the votes of the Comp. Sci. students.

    Here's how the converstaion might go:

    Student: We should only use open tech.

    Administration: But M$ promised us ...

    Student: But, there tech. is broken; it doesn't work as advertised.

    Administration: Well, who are we going to believe. You a scruffy Arts student or the knowledgeble M$ salesman that we relate to?

    Student: But...

    Administration:
    • It doesn't matter. Plenty of candidates comment on stuff that's way outside their jurisdiction or they are largely powerless to change, just to win votes. We have MPs in the UK parliament raising things called "Early Day Motions" and having a vote on them. They don't actually change anything, but they can show to voters who don't know that they feel strongly about a subject.
      • Not saying what you said isn't true. Certainly it is. People do make promises that they don't have the chance to keep to get votes. But, in the context of this article, I find what this canidate is implying, is quite dishonest. That was pretty much my point.

        And I don't really think that it is appropriate to compare what goes on in the UK parliament to what goes on at some university. If only because of the scale and importance, differences.

  • Well... (Score:1)

    by Evro ( 18923 )
    Given how ignorant the overwhelming majority of the populace is (and continually opts to be), and how many people support the current U.S. administration's utter anti-openness, I don't see someone running on a platform of open information going very far. If you ask the average American if they support jailing a reporter for printing a story that says that the government has been monitoring all international phone calls since 9/11/01, "to keep the U.S. safe from terrorism," they'll more than likely say yes.
    • only petty thieves are stupid enough to pick up the phone and call their cohorts overseas to discuss their next nefarious scheme.

      In all fairness, that's not a historically accurate statement. Mafia cases have been, and continue to be, decided on wiretap evidence, despite the fact that Mafia Boss X replaced Mafia Boss X-1 after X-1 was sent away on wiretapping evidence.

      Sure, they're careful most of the time, but it only takes one slipup. One "oh sh1t, I don't have time to find my encryptor" or "I'm so angr
    • I wish I had mod points. That was REALLY off topic. You go into a rant about the Openness of the goverment in a diffrent way than intended. Way to go WAY off topic.
    • "If you ask the average American if they support jailing a reporter for printing a story that says that the government has been monitoring all international phone calls since 9/11/01, "to keep the U.S. safe from terrorism," they'll more than likely say yes. Nevermind that this is an issue that goes to the very core freedoms on which the country was founded, and only petty thieves are stupid enough to pick up the phone and call their cohorts overseas to discuss their next nefarious scheme"

      The entire reason

  • If all the computers used Linux, there wouldn't be so many idiots using them for AIM and other teenage nonsense. Then the students who have projects to do will get to do them in a timely fashion during normal hours!

    Being a former college student, I am all for this. Less exploitation, less jerking off, more getting work done... and if the kids learn to jerk off in Linux, more power to them.

    • I disagree. Once they open up Gaim or Kopete (or, even easier, open up Firefox/Konqueror/some other *nix browser and load AIM [aim.com] or Meebo [meebo.com]), then they'll be chatting on their machines.

      Nothing will get in the way of high schoolers/ college students and their IM/MySpace/Facebook/whatever hit of the day. Unless you give them a command line, but if they find naim....

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