Hi Dan, Yes I know that its quite frustrating when one considers the extent to which the U.K is being 'bled dry.' MS earned almost £700m from Government Contracts in 2010 and of course paid hardly any tax. Even worse, several other large corporations such as Vodaphone just plan their task avoidance schemes as part of their risk portfolio. So that if HMRC do intervene, they can plan on long drawn out court settlements.With any loss just written-off and worthwhile.

In an age where information is king. Proprietary vendors can easily tag and tap user's data. Widows8 may have face recognition added, that can then be augmented by GPS and be linked-up to banking details. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are really active here.

On a more positive note, I don't think the British Public are not so uninformed. My sense is that there is a growing trend for change.The old centralised (MS) business model of pushing products is being replaced by decentralised, pull based, social media. Where free and open-source software, based on pull, is now increasingly answering public need.

At business meetings almost everyone is aware of and using OpenOffice. GIMP is also really popular. Then when people become aware of Free alternatives to their highly priced proprietary apps. It is pleasant to see the look of surprise on their faces. In short, the time for change has arrived. Its just a question of getting the information out there.

Ultimately distributed (P2P) networks can move us away from the centralised thinking that was enhanced during the Industrial Revolution.That lives on in client/server networks. To this end I'm committed to the YacY search engine project : http://yacy.net

John

On Fri, 2012-08-03 at 13:01 +0100, Dan MacDonald wrote:

Whoever voted for our coalition gov? I know I didn't!

Anyone who works for the public and especially those in positions of power and responsibility like our coalition government, should be using free and open source software not only because it would save our supposedly cash-strapped and austerity-enforced nation literally hundreds of millions of pounds a year in MS tax but then we'd also know that MS or Apple or whichever other closed, non-free software vendor weren't harvesting our public records for private, confidential data and using it for who knows what purposes for a start.

Hardly anyone knows about Libreoffice, Openoffice, gnumeric, koffice, GIMP, KDEnlive, Ardour, blender, qtractor, synfig, inkscape, TAL-Noisemaker and many other powerful free desktop productivity software that are freely available because the UK IT curriculum is still totally MS centric. Android people have heard of. Linux - whats that?

Valve's imminent releasing of games for Linux combined with Windows 8s unwanted interface changes could have a huge impact on the current state of peoples willingness to adopt a new platform and new set of apps and will likely lead to more machines coming pre-installed with a Linux variant - which will be good for everyone except maybe MS.

On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 6:09 PM, Anna Morris say.hello.to.anna@googlemail.com wrote: https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/page/s/what-campaign-next-july-2012-1page#pe...

    for those of us who are on the 38 degrees train, they are
    having their annual "what issues should we focus on next" vote
    - there is a box on the form for which campaign should we do
    right now, and I put "all elected bodies should use free
    software and open standards" 

    thought maybe if we all wrote it and got everyone to write it,
    we could make a noise?

    Pass it on folks!! : )

    Love to all

    Anna 

    -- 
    www.ethical-pets.co.uk - The pet shop thats all sorts of
    ethical!


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