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Whistler · **Re: Norway's governement switching to open standards -** 28-06-2005

having said that, that "Redflag software" company has contributed very little to the free software community. Their GNU/Linux distribution is full of proprietary packages (it's 3 binary CDs plus only 1 source CDs, while Debian is 14 binary CDs plus 15 source CDs), and they have also a cheap ripoff of OpenOffice.org with some minor improvements named "RedOffice" (saying it's a ripoff is not wrong as they do claim that they have all the "intellectual property rights" in that "product", which is not even allowed by the BSD License, not to say LGPL and Sun Industry Standard License either). However they do threaten Microsoft's monopoly.

And I don't think our government is willing to promote free software in the common people (maybe they will use Redflag "Linux" and RedOffice in the office for cost and "security" reasons anyway). I had a part-time job in a local company in Lanzhou to deal with their computers and I know that they are required to use 2 proprietary software packages from the government (which are all only available in Windows versions). And I think what's said in that article really means "to support proprietary software which runs in GNU/Linux", rather than generally "to support free software".

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Whistler Summoner Status: Offline Posts: 1,499 Join Date: Feb 2004 Location: Mist Village	Re: Norway's governement switching to open standards - 28-06-2005 having said that, that "Redflag software" company has contributed very little to the free software community. Their GNU/Linux distribution is full of proprietary packages (it's 3 binary CDs plus only 1 source CDs, while Debian is 14 binary CDs plus 15 source CDs), and they have also a cheap ripoff of OpenOffice.org with some minor improvements named "RedOffice" (saying it's a ripoff is not wrong as they do claim that they have all the "intellectual property rights" in that "product", which is not even allowed by the BSD License, not to say LGPL and Sun Industry Standard License either). However they do threaten Microsoft's monopoly. And I don't think our government is willing to promote free software in the common people (maybe they will use Redflag "Linux" and RedOffice in the office for cost and "security" reasons anyway). I had a part-time job in a local company in Lanzhou to deal with their computers and I know that they are required to use 2 proprietary software packages from the government (which are all only available in Windows versions). And I think what's said in that article really means "to support proprietary software which runs in GNU/Linux", rather than generally "to support free software".