This entire change over could be funded by placing a 12 month moratorium on the renaming of roads, bridges, airports, etc. after politicians. Case in point, Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

I wish I could change ran to run, but this site allows no edits.

@frisco, no need to move 100s of 1000s of machines to OSS. [P1] This only applies to new expenditures.

[P2] OSS is more secure. If you were an engineer you’d understand that you do not have to keep source private to use the app privately.

[P3] OpenOffice has all the functionality needed by most. Adding what it lacks could be funded with what we spend in 1 yr for commercial licenses.

@sebourne, I don’t honestly expect the corporation who makes the current dominant software to make a reasonable offer until the inevitable loss of their market share happens. If you think that open source software is products no one wants, you have been mislead. Novel bought Suse. Sun bought MySQL. Yahoo! bought Zimbra. The RedHat project became a major corp. Google, Yahoo!, etc. run on all OSS.

@frisco, any organization or individual would be welcome to place a bid for offering their software under an acceptable license. This very well could result is current (or special off-shoot) versions of well known commercial office suites and operating systems becoming open source software.

As a boon school children would no longer have to use outdated software due to licensing/budget issues.

@jdarius, what is the problem statement that the internet solves? Is it not by the same logic a solution in search of a problem? I expect my that proposal, like the internet, would yield benefits that could not be imagined before its fruition.

If this is of interest to you, also please consider http://obamacto.uservoice.com/pages/general/suggestions/69637

It is important to note that defacto standards like those created then repetitively and intentionally encumbered by MSFT are not Open Standards.

Yes, version control is so important that I think it’s worth having its own suggestion!