When politics does not get in the way of FOSS

Sam Varghese
Monday, 23 March 2009 03:57

Opinion and Analysis

Wright says the money saving angle is important, more so in the case of developing countries. "My belief is by us using it and creating a model, we can get the Australian government using it and that will suddenly add development resources. This is an underlying thing - if you get enough volume that'll add enough development resources to Linux, and advance it for all."

He said people in developing countries could benefit as they could then have a baseline which they could use to evaluate between Microsoft and free alternatives. Adoption of FOSS in a developed country would bring the prospect of its use in the developing world closer and closer. "From a foreign policy perspective, I think it's really important."

There is a great deal of saving on hardware due to the adoption of Linux. "We've got the physical server right here, and then we've got a number of virtual servers running on top. You know, like Xen, the domUs. And this one's running LTSP, the external server project. So basically what happens is the desktops run LTSP client, which is basically like a boot prom, which you can burn to floppy or a USB key or a hard disk. The desktops are this domU, this LTSP running Fedora 7, that's creating Xservers for all these people," says Wright.

"It's saving twice - on the hardware and also electricity. Just keep the hard disks of these things; once you do that it's pretty comparable to many modern low-power machines and they're running Pentium 266s or 200s or whatever. These would have gone to landfill. We've actually deferred these from landfill and deferred the need to purchase new equipment where it's not required. It's sort of like that virtual machine advantage you get by saving processing power by consolidating it on one machine."

The plan is to document everything once a switch has been made to Fedora 10, in the hope that others can benefit from their experience. 

Russell says the Greens policies have always been positive towards FOSS. "One reason for this is we believe that all government documents should be accessible to all citizens. And saying you know, you must buy a new PC for a thousand dollars for software and hardware to access a government website - that's discrimination against poor people and it'snot in the best interests of the community. Everyone should be able get access freely without discrimination. And that means open standards."

He is somewhat disappointed that Linux user groups are not prepared to lobby for policies that benefit them. "Look at the number of different interest groups in the community - farmers, shooters, etc. They have groups, they lobby, they're all wise. They stick bumper stickers on cars. The Linux user groups don't even ask the popular parties questions."

Russel says he has been suggesting a clear list of questions for all parties. "Questions like, what's your position on Linux, what's your position on open document standards for government places, what's your position on using Excel spreadsheets on Australian Bureau of Statistics websites, etc. And just tabulating all the results, and giving check boxes to parties. And so (for) Greens, you'd have a lot of ticks, and other parties, perhaps not very many ticks. I mean, just have this available to all members of the group to assess for voting. And members of the group can always decide to ignore that if they wish. They just have the information there. "