LinuxSA Mailing list archives

  From: Alan Kennington <ak1.linuxsa@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 04:18:11 +0930

Re: News: Open source trade clash

On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 08:47:07AM +0930, Matthew Western wrote:
> 
> ------------------
> THE growing love affair of Australian governments with open source software
> may sour trade negotiations with the US.
> 
> An anti-open source group backed by Microsoft is lobbying furiously to
> stymie open source moves by some states.
> 
> The Washington-based and Microsoft-backed Initiative for Software Choice
> (ISC) has condemned South Australian moves to introduce open source
> preference legislation as "hidden protectionism" that discriminates against
> US software companies.


It shouldn't be forgotten that US health companies consider government
funded hospitals in Australia to be unfair, subsidised competition to
US-style health companies. They also consider that our education system
is unfair competition too. So they would like Australian governments to
get out of both health and education to "make room for the private sector".
The federal govt has already gone a long way towards this by pushing both
health and education up towards free market pricing.

It's also worth pointing out that although a very big chunk of Australian
defence contracting goes to US companies, it's very difficult indeed for
foreign companies to get US defence contracts - not just because we
spell the word "defence" differently, but also because it is not in the US
defence interest to let untrusted foreigners do any defence work for them.

It's all one way now to colonisation and enslavement of the province of
Australia. Globalisation is really provincialisation of the world
along Roman Empire lines. The fact that US companies can dictate government
policy in Australia right down to the State level is pretty shocking.
We really don't deserve to be called a country if the SA govt can't express
a preference for superior software because the US has instructed us
not to have independent ways of doing things. It's reminiscent of the British
forcing the Chinese to get addicted to opium so as to balance the trade
deficit that Britain had with China.

I think that anyone who thinks this is just a matter of cheap software
for the SA government is missing the big picture. The big picture is
_extremely_ scary for anyone who thinks that Australia is still an independent,
sovereign nation state. I would be very surprised if a majority of
SA politicians have the backbone to stand up to the Roman Empire Mark II.
The only chance would be if we could shame the politicians by showing
them what spineless provincials they are. But would they risk their super?
I don't think so....

No one has been talking about the "big picture" for the last few years
because it's just too ugly and shameful to think about.

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

-- 
LinuxSA WWW: http://www.linuxsa.org.au/ IRC: #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net
To unsubscribe from the LinuxSA list:
  mail linuxsa-request@linuxsa.org.au with "unsubscribe" as the subject