.nl
Linux user since 2009, stayed with Fedora ever since (and I like it!).
Interested in Open Source Way of doing things, sharing ideas and solutions. Focus on human aspects rather than bits & bytes. Favour nifty tools like markdown, newsbeuter and grep.
Learned the command line through breaking my system and annoying my house mates -- but also used CLI to get it running again ;-)
Authored Comments
wow Rikki ! Great Talk on how to use Social Media. TNX
in exactly 5 minutes you got to the very core of using Social Media.
at my company I have to improve security awareness to about 10k coworkers. social media is getting more and more important and is one of the foremost means of reaching this lot of people. thanks to your talk I can improve my strategy and be more effective.
I agree that governments could do a lot more on Open Source. But where culture and supply chain is dominated by propretary software it seems hard to change. Contradictionary because transparency of government is essential and contracting just one single vendor is not. Contradictionary also because using the peoples money to run their business governments always should keepther spendings at a decent level.
Over here in the Netherlands though there are some remarkable exceptions. One local government body spent all IT budget on software development that whent totally wrong and they had hardly anything to spend. Then someone suggested a switch to Open Source -- and they did. Now they are an example that switching to Open Source is possible and brings extra advantage of lower cost for not having to pay big license fees. Unfortunately there is no massive switch to Open Source yet.
Other European countries have good examples too, where the French Gandermerie Nationale [1] and most Spanish regions [2] are great examples. Even the EU government is promoting open standards, although they chose a proprietary system for themselves. Maybe it is the strive for independence that boosts choosing Open Source. For the rest Free Software movements should keep on asking governments why they made the choices they made.
Government officials often state that switching to another operating system will confuse workers and tailor made software will become obsolete. But how come lots of people privately switched from Microsoft to Mac, Nokia phones to iOS without complaining? Besides, most corporate software runs web based so the OS is no longer the bottleneck. As the French Gendarmerie commander once stated: people only have to get used to differend icons and games (or something alike). Luckily the game of Mines also exists for Linux.
The command-and-control culture of governments is a strange phenomena. Many navies and armies adopted Open Source to control vessels etc. Remarkable because command and control is their speciality and confidentiality of their infrastructure is of utmost importance. But they made the switch mainly to have rocksolid reliable systems, the same reason ISS got 'Linuxed'.
Cutting budgets can be a lever to a broader adoption of Open Source in government. Civil servants that keep on asking for more Open Source could help too. And maybe it helps when Linux sales people sometimes wear a suit ;-)
[1] https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/french-gendarmerie-open…
[2] https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/spains-extremadura-star…