[Am-info] Oregon Legislative Assembly contemplates dropping MS

[Roy Bixler]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 10:19:09AM -0800, T. Guilbert wrote:
> >From the Portland (OR) Oregonian: 
> 
>  >http://makeashorterlink.com/?E226329F3
> 
> House panel will consider open-source software bill
> 
> 03/26/03
> JEFFREY KOSSEFF
> 
> A new bill would make Oregon the first state to take a formal stance
> against the hefty fees and technological limitations of software
> produced by large corporations such as Microsoft.

This topic was covered on this week's "Linux Show".  It's Web casted
live, but one can listen to the show via its home page at
"http://thelinuxshow.com".  The two guests they had on the second
half of the show were Ken Barber and Cooper Stevenson who played roles
in drafting the bill.

The interesting part of the show was where Barber was talking about
his inspirations for the bill.  Besides more obvious places like
Peru's bill by Villanueva or California's bill by Pennington, he looks
at some of Microsoft's own Web pages to see their objections to
previous open source bills and draft his bill in such a way as to
remove the objections.  I understand that the Oregon bill merely says
that open source software should be considered on an equal footing
with traditional propietary software.

R.