Article from CyberEuskadi (Spanish)


Babelfish translation

All political parties united, and all representatives (except one who is always difficult anyway, Batasuna) agreed in favor of the utilization of Free Software in the Basque public administration. While this show of unity in the Euskadi parliament is almost incredible in itself, it was also amazing how much the legislators actually knew about the topic. The tone of some of the debaters was characterized as "rebel-libertarian".

While we have heard that discussions of this sort have taken place before at high levels of smaller governments, until this was brought to our attention we had never heard of anyone at this level who had the courage to go on record with such accusations. Suspicions have been raised, for example, when officials from both Microsoft and the US government have been present at high-level sales meetings in foreign governments; and a conservative reading of the Microsoft EULA reveals that by using the software one agrees to this sort of activity. It has also been pointed out that Microsoft's own internal Director of Homeland Security has strong ties to the US senate and military, both of which tend to make other sovereign government somewhat cautious of late.


It's amazing what you can do with a browser program on port 80, which can't be reasonably firewalled, when no one can see the source code.