Quote:
Originally posted by Ogre
Groups like that (government, schools, large corporations) are never gonna be allowed to use open source. Thats where microsoft gets a huge chunk of their revenue. And everyone should know by now, unfortunatly, what ever microsoft wants, microsoft gets.
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That's just plain not true. As of right now, I don't know of any laws that prevent said organizations from using Open Source stuff--laws like Oregon's are designed to increase actual OS use, not merely make it "allowed".
Examples:
Anyone who runs OS X is running an Open Source operating system ever since March of 1999 when Apple Open Sourced Darwin.
Netscape OS'd their browser in the form of Mozilla on January 22, 1998. My school has Netscape installed on every computer.
The Roger Maris Cancer Center in Fargo uses Linux and other open source software to care for patients. They claim "The proper care of our cancer patients would not be what it is today without Linux".
IBM ships many of its new Mainframes (z900 for example) with Linux and other OS tools.
The governments of France, China, and Germany have all adopted open-source-only policies for government and educational computers .
Anyways, I pulled all these facts from an open-source Research Paper I wrote a while back. I've attached an old draft (I can't find the final version) to this post in case anybody's interested: