Egyptian Government To Adopt Free Software On Larger Scale

ezabi writes "After announcing a 43 million USD license agreement with Microsoft, the Egyptian government was faced with a protest from FOSS enthusiasts staging a protest before the cabinet. Later, representatives from the community had a meeting with the minister of communications and information technology. Such a meeting led to the ministry issuing a press release (in Arabic) stating its commitment to gradually move to open source (Google Translate to English) as a strategic option for future projects. It's worth mentioning that all governmental websites used in the elections and constitution referendum were all based on open source solutions."

And open interfaces?

[MichaelSmith]

Hard to imagine that the Egyptian Government will be happy in the long term with software which gives the user full control over encryption and messaging. They will want a nice closed source solution with DRM right there in the kernel, firmly attached to the hardware.

Charlie Brooker on Windows ...

[dgharmon]

"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it".

"using Windows is like living in a communist bloc nation circa 1981" Charlie Brooker [guardian.co.uk]

There wasn't anyone else

[dbIII]

The only form of legal assembly was religious groups so they were the only ones that were organised enough to run the place after the old government was kicked out