[ILUG] Re: The I.S.A in the Irish Times

[Tony Groves]

Here's the text of an e-mail I sent to lettersed at irish-times.ie :

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Dear Editor,

So Cathal Friel of the Irish Software Association thinks that 
open-source computer software is "stifling innovation" (page 5, 
Microsoft supplement, Irish Times, 18 March). This is the same line as 
is being taken by one of his most prominent members, the global 
monopolist Microsoft Corporation, who have a long history of 
aggressively stifling any competition in their pursuit of ever-higher 
profits.

The reason that open-source software is becoming so successful is 
precisely because it is so innovative. It is produced by teams of 
volunteer and sponsored programmers from a wide spectrum of industry and 
academia; anybody can download it from the internet and use it free of 
charge; you can examine its inner workings (if you have programming 
skills) to make sure that it is not compromising your computer system, 
and even modify it to suit your own requirements. All of this is 
diametrically opposite to Microsoft's strategy of high prices, 
restrictive licencing, paranoid secrecy, and lax security.

Prominent examples of open-source software include OpenOffice.org (a big 
threat to Microsoft's lucrative Office suite), Mozilla Firefox and 
Thunderbird (regarded as far safer and more innovative than Internet 
Explorer and Outlook Express), and ultimately the GNU/Linux operating 
system (which includes some features that Windows users can only dream 
about).

So, the biggest threat to innovation in software is not open-source 
software, but those monopolists who would seek to stamp it out.

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It might not be published, but if enough messages arrive, they will 
probably publish one or two.

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On another topic: whatever happened the "message number" headers in the 
ILUG digests? They're very useful for looking up messages of interest; 
any chance of getting them back again permanently?