German Free/Open Source Migration Project 18
Jaws writes: "BSI (the German equivalent of NIST) has announced a project proposal for planning and implementation of partial migration of certain federal government offices to free/open source products. Three sites in two cities, servers and desktops, each site with a few dozen/several hundred seats. They are asking for a full-service, detailed plan including infrastructure, installation, documentation, support, and education. Looks like a reasonable pilot project. (The original in German; Fish-English version)"
things are fishy... (Score:1)
Re:things are fishy... (Score:2)
I guess they just blacklisted Slashdot fearing the Intermediate Slashdot Effect (Since many people dont speak German, they all go to babelfish and IT gets killed, instead of the actual destination
Re:things are fishy... (Score:1)
Re:bad news for Linux? (Score:1)
Re:bad news for Linux? (Score:1)
Godwin's Law prov. [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.
Funny post, but: (Score:2)
> reminded more than one person of the fascism practiced half a century ago in Germany
Even as a jokster you should learn the difference between fascism and communism. Faschism is in no ideological way concerned with the redestribution of wealth; that is the prerogative of communism. Faschism is what Mr. Ashcroft and his Bible buddies practice.
Fascism (Score:1)
Re:Fascism (Score:2)
Wrong, that's communism. Faschism is concerned with nationalism and xenophobia, the belief in the superiority of certain races over others, etc. It's focused on social order issues rather than economic ones. For example, Germany under Nazi rule was mostly a market economy, with the exception that party officials had lots of latitude in intervening in individual companies. After all, if you wield absolute power, laws of commerce don't mean all that much. You can always "expose" the proprietors as Jews if they don't give you your piece of the pie.
Re:Fascism (Score:1)
Your citation of Germany as being a market economy is correct - a market econonmy in which all economic activity was subject to control by the state. Krupp Steel's ownership was managed by the Nazis. About 1925 (?) the last remaining Krupp heir was a woman. She was married off to "some guy" who adopted the name of Krupp (see "The Arms of Krupp", a fascinating book.)
According to Merriam-Webster [m-w.com], you're correct as well regarding the social component. I was ignoring that aspect in the discussion, partly because I'm lazy
M-W: "a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition."
This reminds me of Anakin Skywalker in SWII - "Someone should make them do the right thing."
Re:Fascism (Score:2)
That's exactly what I said, but you claimed that about fascism.
A major difference between communism and fascism is that while the former had a well formalized doctrine (e.g. Marx's writings), the latter didn't. While we can judge communist ideology by reading its writings AND by observing its implementations, fascism is really only defined by its implementations. There is no The Fascist Manifest to draw upon (unless you consider Mein Kampf and Goebbels' ramblings that), only the fascist reality under Nazi rule. Given that, you have to conclude that the heart of fascist ideology is social darwinism (aided by personal biases), rather than any economic considerations. Control of the economy was more of a consequence of opportunity rather than doctrine. Of course, since expansion was central to Nazi doctrine (Lebensraum), and this required military build-up and war, which in turn required huge sums of money and industrial production, you could argue that control and redirection of the economy towards these goals was vital to Nazi doctrine as well. But I would still consider it more a consequence than a goal. Nazis weren't at all concerned with redestribution of wealth and the creation of an egalitarian society. In fact, they were quite happy with the concentration of wealth in the hands of a devoted few.
Re:Fascism (Score:1)
Offhand and without having read it, I'd say Mein Kampf amounts to a manifesto as well as Marx (which I have read - I wrote a paper in high school that compared communism to capitalism, and possibly in a prefiguring of my software engineering future, determined that a primary problem with communism was the lack of any feedback loops, which results in an unstable system:O). Certainly those corporations under Nazi rule that didn't enthusiastically participate generally were 'taken over' in all senses of the word.
One could argue that the Fascists were (as all governments) practicing redistribution of wealth - in the other direction. Outside of defense & international affairs, all government activity is by definition redistribution of wealth at the point of a gun. But that's a whole other topic - where are the points on a gun?
not only there (Score:3, Informative)
the lower saxonia police tested win2k and xp against linux and found out that linux is more secure, easier to administrate and saves about 20 milliones euros in 10 years.
at the present time lower saxonia police uses 5500 x terminals with 200 unix mainframes.
the text in german is here
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/odi-17.
BSI software offerings + warning. (Score:2, Informative)
They've opensourced Sphinx, formerly a project aimed at providing secure email within German government agencies which is essentially a plugin for various email clients (appa which implements S/MIME as well as an S/MIME incompatible national encrypted email standard called MailTrust [teletrust.de] (spec available in German only). Apparently they're integrating the Sphinx code in KDE's kMail and in mutt. You can find the Sphinx code here. [gnupg.org]
Another opensource project I could find right away is DiCop (Distributed Computing in Perl), a GPL'd distributed job execution environment consisting of an administration server and client/worker software. The administration server sends jobs to the client/workers and collects the results. You can get DiCop here [bsi.bund.de].
Please keep in mind that BSI is an agency of a foreign government no longer outright sympathetic to American interests.