Re: [Sheflug] cospa project

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 21:21, Andres Baravalle wrote:
> thanks for the intersting pointer. I had already seen the site of 
> FLOSSIE but not the one of affs.

Interesting; we ran FLOSSIE ;)

> our uk partner has been telling us that it will be very difficult to 
> find a single public administration willing to use open source, and that 
> is our main problem, now.

We can find you people running free software, not a problem. It probably
depends on what you mean by "public administration"; certainly, there
are people in the public sector using it.

> I think that "open standards" are a hot area, where most claim that they 
> are using open standards while in fact there is almost nothing open in 
> their standard.

Oh, definitely. If your study could establish some measure of an open
standard - taking into account some of the problems I raised, like
patents - that would definitely be useful.

>  From my point of view open data standards play a very important role, 
> thus they allow interoperability between applications. It is not "fair" 
> for administration to use formats like MS ones for external 
> comunications. They force others to adopt the same applications.

Indeed. One interesting licence to look at - from your point of view -
is the GNU Free Documentation Licence, or GFDL/FDL. The FDL describes
the idea of a "transparent" format, which is basically the same as your
open standard. You might want to look at how the FDL treats these
problems, the idea of transparency is quite useful.

In terms of the Linux seminar on the 23rd - I think AFFS will be
attending. As Richard pointed out, we went to the first one, and
contrary to his belief I'm fairly sure we attended the second, although
possibly incognito ;) I've heard Ruediger speak before, he's very good
and well worth listening too.

Richard is also right about O'Reilly - they do publish a number of free
books, and are one of the few presses around the world that do. GNU
Press obviously do too, and Prentice Halls' Bruce Perens series:

	http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/
	http://www.gnupress.org/
	http://perens.com/Books/

Well worth checking out. Obviously, by 'free' book I'm not implying that
you shouldn't part with some money for them, books are pretty hard to
make guys ;)

Cheers,

Alex.

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