Trolls' Purpose 13465

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Thomas Wootten wrote on Tue, 01 Nov 2005 19:30:25 +0000

s-campaign on-run on their hardware

One could quibble about fairness here, but ideally Linux would trounce Microsoft on its own turf without help from the goverment. (It's been helpful that Microsoft seems to have been fairly good lately at shooting itself in the foot, though the hackers, for reasons of their own, are being helpful as well; I suspect as time goes on, however, that said hackers will simply go after the biggest target, which may very well be IBM, as Microsoft diminishes in importance on the desktop -- if it ever does.)

Also, ideally, an encryption algorithm should be totally transparent and utterly uncrackable without the private key. I for one would think government would want to be transparent as well, if only because that way we can ensure that shenanigans such as the Iraq "For Our Own Defense Because He's got WMDs...Erm, I Mean, Because We Wanted To" war can be avoided.

Open source would be a step in governmental openness but it is not really a requirement here, merely a means to an end -- careful design of an IIS website would allow for anyone to access it, not just IE.

I for one wouldn't recommend IIS, but I'm not sure about disallowing it for government procurement, either, as long as the requirements from the end-user perspective are clearly laid out and include accessibility from browsers in accordance with W3 and other published standards.

-- It's still legal to go .sigless.