Free Republic

Microsoft welcomes UK govt open source policy By ComputerWire Posted: 07/29/2002 at 06:50 EST Microsoft Corp has given a warm welcome to the UK government's recent open source software policy statement, indicating a further softening of the company's approach to its open source rivals. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft appears to have a growing respect for the competitive threat posed by open source software, and has given a broad thumbs-up to the UK Office of Government Commerce's report, which promotes the use of open source software in local and national government institutions and public-sector organizations. "We welcome the policy statement in that...

Lower costs, more flexible By Egan Orion: Wednesday 17 July 2002, 13:40 FOUR YEARS AGO the US Navy was embarrassed when a divide-by-zero fault cascaded through Windows NT systems on the cruiser USS Yorktown, leaving it dead in the water for hours. Now a US Navy organisation is using Linux in some mission-critical roles both shipboard and onshore with good benefits. The Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) is working with the Open-Source Software Institute (OSSI) to assess its current use of Open Source software and develop recommendations going forward, according to Andrew Aitken, Managing Partner of Olliance Consulting Group, which is...

Apache worm starts to spread Security experts are rushing to decode a worm program that exploits a 2-week-old flaw to infect computers running vulnerable versions of the popular open-source Apache Web server application. The worm is thought to be capable of spreading only to Web servers running the FreeBSD operating system, an open-source variant of Unix, that haven't had a patch applied for the recent flaw. Although few people have reported the worm, it is thought to be infecting vulnerable Web servers worldwide. "It is spreading," said Domas Mituzas, a systems developer for Baltic information-technology firm Microlink Systems and the...

Study: Open, closed source equally secure By Robert Lemos Staff Writer, CNET News.com June 20, 2002, 6:00 PM PT Proprietary programs should mathematically be as secure as those developed under the open-source model, a Cambridge University researcher argued in a paper presented Thursday at a technical conference in Toulouse, France. In his paper, computer scientist Ross Anderson used an analysis equating finding software bugs to testing programs for the mean time before failure, a measure of quality frequently used by manufacturers. Under the analysis, Anderson found that his ideal "open-source" programs were as secure as the "closed-source" programs. "Other things...

"Opening the Open-Source Debate" The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI) has finally published its white paper entitled "Opening the Open Source Debate". My earlier comments were based on media reports and e-mail correspondence with the paper's author. This document was written after I read the actual white paper. (The original link seems not to work; I managed to grab a copy of the paper before AdTI pulled it. This link may work.) The AdTI's very weak and poorly-researched paper opens no debate. It simply confirms that Microsoft paid AdTI to come up with something---anything---to stem the growing adoption of open-source...

A few weeks ago I joined the free software camp, replacing my trusty and mostly reliable, Microsoft Office with the 1.0 release of OpenOffice.org. By free, I mean OpenOffice.org is an open source, zero-cost replacement for Microsoft Office with a comparable feature set. My verdict so far: OpenOffice.org rates a 7 on a scale of 10 from the perspective of an individual user untethered from corporate manacles. OpenOffice.org is indeed comparable to Microsoft Office in terms of its capabilities across its various modules. I've been using the version 1.0 release for my daily word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing tasks....

Can the federal government use its purchasing power to solve issues concerning security and competition in the software market? As you know, Microsoft has an astounding market share for desktop operating systems and office productivity software. The Department of Justice is spending years in court trying to restrain very modest elements of Microsoft's monopoly abuses. There are serious problems with the Microsoft monopoly, including those associated with harm to innovation, security, and pricing. We request the following information to advance constructive deliberations on this subject: continued

A Washington think tank calling itself the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution is preparing to release a 'study' warning that the widespread use of open source software will allow international terrorists to have their way with us. "Terrorists trying to hack or disrupt U.S. computer networks might find it easier if the federal government attempts to switch to 'open source' as some groups propose," the group warned in a press release. We imagine the argument will have to go something like this: Microsoft software is safer because the company carefully conceals its security flaws; thus evil terrorists will never find them...

Taiwan is turning its back on software from the likes of Microsoft to develop its own open-source project, according to a recent report. The Taiwanese government plans to start an open-source project as early as next year that could save it as much as $295 million in royalty payments to Microsoft, according to a report from Taiwan's Central News Agency. Open-source software such as the Linux operating system may be freely modified and redistributed without the legal and financial constraints of proprietary software from Microsoft, Oracle and others. An official with the National Center for High Performance Computing, Chuang Tze-nan,...

A conservative U.S. think tank suggests in an upcoming report that open-source software is inherently less secure than proprietary software, and warns governments against relying on it for national security. The white paper, Opening the Open Source Debate, from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (ADTI) will suggest that open source opens the gates to hackers and terrorists. "Terrorists trying to hack or disrupt U.S. computer networks might find it easier if the federal government attempts to switch to 'open source' as some groups propose," ADTI said in a statement released ahead of the report. Open-source software is freely available for...

Open-Source Fight Flares At PentagonMicrosoft Lobbies Hard Against Free Software By Jonathan Krim Washington Post Staff WriterThursday, May 23, 2002; Page E01 Microsoft Corp. is aggressively lobbying the Pentagon to squelch its growing use of freely distributed computer software and switch to proprietary systems such as those sold by the software giant, according to officials familiar with the campaign. In what one military source called a "barrage" of contacts with officials at the Defense Information Systems Agency and the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld over the past few months, the company said "open source" software threatens security and...