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Lessig Talks About Corruption

As a followup to the last post about illegal surveillance, here's the new Lessig lecture on how to fight corruption in government.

If you don't know Lawrence Lessig, he's considered one of the top legal minds in the country and a likely supreme court justice at some point in his career, except that he chose to fight the mess of the US intellectual property system instead (e.g. bad patents, lousy copyrights, and a patent process overrun by greed and incompetence) because he felt that it was compromising our society and economy.

Now he's aiming at the bigger target of government corruption. I hope he becomes this era's Elliot Ness. We need one.

Labels: corruption, government, lessig

Posted by Mark Sunday, October 14, 2007 11:31:00 AM | permalink | (0) comments

Navy OKs Open Source

On June 5 the Navy gave the stamp of approval to open source software as an option for their contracts. This is a big deal since government procurement has all sorts of complicated requirements, and you have to be included in that process to get in the door. This paves the way for other government agencies to follow suit.

"Open-source software is now an official option for all information technology systems in the Navy and Marine Corps, according to a guidance memo issued June 5 by the Department of the Navy’s Office of the Chief Information Officer."

Good news for open source providers, as well as systems integrators. For the SIs, it means they can take a larger portion of the project budget for services, rather than having that money go to software partners. The question is whether they will pick up on that, given that they sometimes resell software and other times the software vendors get them into projects. It's a conflicted world out there.

Labels: government, open source

Posted by Mark Thursday, June 21, 2007 12:59:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments