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we believe: it is unethical for government to enforce proprietary software licenses, which prohibit people from sharing with each other That's a little bit ext

we believe: it is unethical for government to enforce proprietary software licenses, which prohibit people from sharing with each other That's a little bit extreme to me. Overall, the letter is not that convincing. They highlight the fact that with free software, costs go down because you don't need to track how many licenses you are using. True. But on the other hand, you need to track the modifications you make and make sure you follow the redistribution requirements. So honestly, it's a wash: either way, you need to dedicate resources to enforcing the terms of the license.

natrius 16y ago
The government doesn't do a lot of external redistribution of software that I know of, besides things like VistA[1], which is free software itself. For the vast majority of the software the government uses, the license enforcement costs would be zero. For the rest, the cost would be less than the corresponding proprietary application. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VistA