[PLUG] AeA Awards Rep. Minnis

Geoff Burling llywrch at agora.rdrop.com
Sat Jan 10 19:21:02 UTC 2004


On Sat, 10 Jan 2004 gepr at tempusdictum.com wrote:

>  > On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 03:10:12PM -0800, gepr at tempusdictum.com wrote:
>  > > Woohoo!!  Cheers to Minnis for killing it!  And congrats to Minnis
>  > > and Decket.
>  >
>  > Just whose side are you on, anyway?  Minnis really blocked an obvious
>  > cost-cutting measure and killed it outright, and you think that's good?
>
> I'm on the side of limited government and the delegation of
> responsibility to individuals who are accountable for those decisions.
>
> Packing the law books with more laws will not help open source (or
> proprietary software).... It will just make me (a small business
> owner) spend more and more money on attorneys in order to figure out
> what the hell I'm supposed to do with the software I create and use.
>
> In the case of these bills, requiring certain special interest groups
> get attention by the bureaucrats, will just force us to hire more (and
> smarter) bureaucrats, thereby spending more of our money employing
> people who could be doing something productive with their lives.
>
> If the open source community wants to help the propogation of open
> source, then do 2 things:  1) write more CODE or work on code that
> is being used and 2) work to REMOVE legislation that forces decision
> makers to give unbalanced attention to special interest groups.
>
> If open source is the highest quality and the playing field is level,
> then it will win.  (In fact, I think it'll win even if the playing
> field isn't level -- I'm about 90% free of proprietary software
> myself.)
>
> [grin]  Sorry for the diatribe.  But, YES, I think it's good that
> the bill was killed, even if it was killed for other reasons.
>
I think I have just read an argument from an old-fashioned Republican.
The kind of person who screams that government should not spend a dime
more than it absolutely has to -- unless it concerns a contract that
person has submitted, in which case the government MUST pay top dollar.

I, for one, see nothing wrong with asking for justification for paying
money for software when alternatives can be downloaded & installed from
the Internet at little to no cost. Unfortunately, Minnis & the AeA
don't want to justify this procedure; they would rather have a special
spending account with no limits & no accountability when it comes to
software.

Geoff





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