bjoernvold.com

Without Open source software our world would have looked seriously different:

No no no... a lot of this is outright propaganda.

1. What wouldn't we have.
It is not really fair to make it sound like

- the Internet would not exist without open source
- Google wouldn't exist without open source
- large portions of Africa wouldn't have Internet access without open source
- Software written in poor countries wouldn't exist without open source

Does he specifically say we wouldn't have these things without open source? No... does he imply it? Yes, he sure does.

2. Government use of open source.
Governments choose open source for public relations or paranoia, not financial reasons. Specifically mentioning that governments use a great deal of open source makes it sound like they intentionally go seek out open source software when in fact their choice is more often that of availability. For example, many organizations (governments included) use VMWare products, much of which is open source. Is it because they specifically want open source software or is it because ESX offers more flexibility than Hyper-V? Or because it is easier to find ESX experts than Xen experts? Or because ESX is an enterprise ready application while VirtualBox is not?

3. Open Government.
I don't know of any examples of any government using software written by another government. I have a really hard time believing that any government would trust any other government enough to even bother considering the idea. Is it stupid of them not to consider it? Yes. Do governments make stupid decisions like not using software written by other governments? All day long.

A government using open source software does not change the life of its citizens, that is an enormous stretch.

A government releasing source for other governments to use does not "share any culture" with the second government or its citizens.

A government releasing source does not let its citizens see what the government has been doing.

A government releasing source does not show its citizens where it has been spending their money.

A government releasing source does not let its citizens evaluate whether the government has been delivering expected services.

Paper based voting and electronic voting are both entirely useless. If every last eligible voter turned up at your next election and voted for your candidate or party, you know what would change? Nothing.

Implying that an entire population is able to determine what happens when they "press the button" at an open source voting station is ridiculous. Open source software allows a few percent of the population to make that evaluation and of those few, almost none of them will take the time to.

Total propaganda.

Would the world be different without open source? Yes. Could such a place exist? No. Is open source a good thing? Yes. Is it the Jesus-of-all-software messiah? No. Do governments use open source? Yes. Do governments use open source because of reduced licensing or renewal costs? No.

My 3¢
S.

Good points.
Governments use Open source because it is the most functional and the best. In any other case they would gladly spend your tax money. Governments use supercomputers and they are useless without open source OS'es.
Due to lobbying capacity Governments tend to use proprietary software even if it is not the best. Bill Gates is the no1 lobbyist for MS and he combines it with charity so he gets in all over the world.
IBM is the main supercomputer builder and they use lots of Linux. So when it needs to be really big the Open Source OS, LInux is a necessity
it has changed the world - Big Data is Linux driven The data would not be so big with Windows..

I doubt that Google or Facebook could exist on a Windows platform, at least not in the scale they have today.

So I think his claims are pretty valid. The internet needed a million hands to drive it forward, if it had been patented by some company it would not have spread to what we know today.

Does Hotmail still run on Windows?
S.

I think it does.
Some guy gave me an hotmail address the other day.