The secret to a more secure and cost effective government is through open source technologies and products.

The claim comes from one of Silicon Valley's most respected business leaders Scott McNealy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems. He revealed he has been asked to prepare a paper on the subject for the new administration.

"It's intuitively obvious open source is more cost effective and productive than proprietary software," he said. "Open source does not require you to pay a penny [in license fees] to Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or [almost] any proprietary vendor [alert!] any money." ...

President Obama has said he is prepared to go through the budget "line by line" to cut wasteful spending, but has so far failed to give any specifics of how that would be done.

The Open Source Initiative, or OSI, is fully supportive of Mr McNealy's efforts which both believe is one of the main solutions the new President cannot afford to ignore.

"Scott is absolutely correct about the benefits which have been demonstrated time and again," said OSI President Michael Tiemann. "It's an accident of history [??!!!]that proprietary standards became so entrenched so early and it's been a colossal expense for government."

File Under Ager, Philip / Surveillance | TG Daily | 19 Jan 2009

[Advertisment] Gdrive is basically a cloud-based storage  [remote proprietary device] that should have two faces: A desktop client that keeps local and online files and folders in two-directional sync via a web interface for accessing your desktop files anywhere and anytime, using any network-enabled computer. In addition, it will come tightly integrated with other Google services to enable editing of supported document types, like spreadsheets and presentations via Google Docs, email via Gmail, images via Picasa Web Albums, etc.

This opens powerful possibilities. For instance, you could start working on a spreadsheet at home and continue via Gdrive web interface accessed in an Internet cafe. When you arrive back home, changes to the spreadsheet have already trickled down from the cloud to your desktop. The idea, of course, is all but revolutionary, but Google's execution could set it apart.  ... [ / Advertisment]

With Gdrive, privacy implications could overshadow its benefits. Remember how privacy advocates chased Google "to hell and back" for indexing content of Gmail messages? [and Google vs Gonzales?] It also didn't help any that the company scanned your email in order to serve better, more relevant ads when viewing a message. Gdrive would scan everything you upload to it, just like Google Desktop - the company's application that brings the power of its search engine to your desktop (it scans the content of authorized files and folders on your machine).

We don't, however, see a problem if Gdrive will let users exclude any file or folder from being sent online, plus if indexed Gdrive stuff can't be associated with our personal [?!]  information. ... [emphasis added]