[school-discuss] FLOSS & Government: Call for Info &c

[Joel Kahn <jj2kk4@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm working on an email message to my state
representative (Mike Parson, Missouri 
District 133, Republican) in which I'm hoping
to get him thinking about FLOSS and talking
to his fellow public servants about it.
I'm aiming at getting the message sent
during the next week or so, but I don't have
a very hard deadline--yet.

I'm building a list of links to include in
the message. I recognize that it is possible
to argue for either a short list or a long
one in these circumstances, but right now I'm
leaning towards laying it on thick. My
reasoning: if this rep is locked within the
still-prevailing "computing equals Microsoft"
mindset (and I have no way of knowing), then
it should be helpful if I can establish that
FLOSS is not just some small fly-by-night
notion that has emerged from the lunatic
fringe. In this context, I think the rule
should be "the more examples, the merrier."

Thus, I already have on the list the usual
suspects (gnu.org, linux.org, opensource.org, 
schoolforge.net, &c), plus various other
relevant sites that have been posted on
school-discuss (semi)recently. I'm still
open for more; if anyone out there thinks
that it could be good publicity for their
organization or whatever if they volunteered
to be a research source for the Missouri
government, send me some data.

One more thing that I wanted to present for
discussion. . . . Already on my list are
these three sites:

http://www.oracle.com/us/industries/public-sector/index.html

http://www.redhat.com/solutions/government

http://www.novell.com/company/contacts-offices

I mention them because I know that some
extreme FLOSS purists (the Richard Stallman
type) have problems with the way large
companies deal with free software--mixing
free & non-free programs, pushing the
boundaries on licenses, &c. My thinking is
that, at this stage, the priority should be
directing people's attention towards FLOSS
in a very broad way, and including giants
like Oracle is a good way to do that.

I look forward to getting feedback related
to everything in this message.

Joel