tapping the libre world - USA steams ahead of Russia

[Zenaan Harkness]

A very rare instance where the USA government is taking the initiative,
in positive way, rather than just bombing and droning people to death on
a daily basis.

Russia legislated to "preference domestic software" in comparison.

As most around here know, free-libre open source software, when even
marginally funded, has an almost certain chance to dominate its sector
or niche over any and all proprietary alternatives, at least over the
medium term.

This means that the USA government, and any companies building on
government-funded libre source code, are likely to have a competitive
edge over those companies and governments that do not build such a
community ecosystem. It's a simple matter of the mathematical and human
dynamics in play with libre software.

On the libre front, Red Hat is unimpeachable, absolutely impeccable
record for sticking to libre principles, and they maintain a very
enviable position in the software services market.

Yes Red Hat had a first mover advantage (Cygnus), but the point is, they
can never be unfairly challenged on their fundamental competitive edge -
libre software; at most competitors can compete and target particular
sectors and offer "better" service to potential customers, but no one
can ever be more competitive on the fundamental software front, since
libre open source software IS a level playing field.

The Russian PostgreSQL services company thread we saw here a few months
ago is a great example - they are building a lead in Russia which will
become unassailable in the way that Red Hat is unassailable.

And in both cases, rightly so, and righteously so!

(I even tried to use RedHat for a few weeks some years back, to see if
it would be appealing to me, but alas my Debian muscle memory wracked my
soul in an irrevocable death grip of libre file locations and command
sequences...)

There are other examples <AHEMCAUGH>tor<GRRMHPH> too - it is difficult
to challenge hegemony, much more so a libre community-oriented "fully
open source, man" hegemony :/



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https://lwn.net/Articles/696843/
The People’s Code (White House blog)
[Announcements] Posted Aug 9, 2016 18:56 UTC (Tue) by ris

US Chief Information Officer Tony Scott introduces[1] the Federal Source
Code Policy[2], on the White House blog. "By making source code
available for sharing and re-use across Federal agencies, we can avoid
duplicative custom software purchases and promote innovation and
collaboration across Federal agencies. By opening more of our code to
the brightest minds inside and outside of government, we can enable them
to work together to ensure that the code is reliable and effective in
furthering our national objectives. And we can do all of this while
remaining consistent with the Federal Government’s long-standing
policy of technology neutrality, through which we seek to ensure that
Federal investments in IT are merit-based, improve the performance of
our government, and create value for the American people." (Thanks to
David A. Wheeler)

 [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2016/08/08/peoples-code
 [2] https://sourcecode.cio.gov/