Jon "Maddog" Hall Reasonings on Why Should You Go Free & Open Source

Never have I found reasons so compelling as to why should I start embracing the free (as of freedom) and open source software movement than those that were suggested by Jon “Maddog” Hall at his keynote address this morning; particularly because his reasoning are of economics and quantifiable. As far as I can remember, here are the five points that this Director of Linux International put forward on why should any entity, be it programmer, community, firm, and even government should push the free and open source agenda to the forefront of their IT strategy:

Balance of payment. Keeping capital in the country as maintenance and support utilizes local talents and reducing licensing payment that overburdens the governments and domestic firms.

Creation of quality job. Case study of four town’s office in California of that leverages on OSS, to govern the small town 300,000 population postal, fire department, police, etc services.

Empowerment. Equal right with everybody else. (One of the GPL licensing principle)

Security Control. It is only makes sense that any government could control the source code of the operating system or software that runs strategic defense or military application.

Business Decision. That instead of having vendors predetermine the very dynamic business rules, most firms today can determine their own set of technology for adoption and even on purpose creating a heterogenous environment (for security purpose) due to the promotion of open standards by the open source community.

Getting the chance to have some chat with Maddog would also mean that you got to dig in some dirt in the SCO case against IBM. According to him, the open souce community could care less about the litigation, that the filing might take seven years down the road to be over; and interestingly, it was also pointed out that the claim of SCO on IBM, although has got to do with the code they disclosed last week; the truth is that it has to do with some contractual problems between SCO and IBM dated years back.

And it will be interesting to listen to what he has to say tomorrow. (I will get more points above updated)

Comments

[haxa]

he is well known as maddog everywhere he goes. it's like his middle name
written as Jon "Maddog" Hall.

[Adib]

I am reading.Please keep on reporting.I don't think this Jon is a maddog.

[haxa]

Interesting as Maddog pointed this morning (Wednesday), the rivalry is not ideological, as open source promotes the full 'liberization' in the industry that we should let the market rules and let consumer freely choose what they want, and have that monopolistic behavior in the industry wipe out. I will post Maddog points this morning on 12 points that poeple usually got it wrong on Open Source.

[aizul]

The rivalry between open source and propreitary is like a war
between capitalism vs socialism. :D
-geek by nature php by choice-