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yet another example of Bush' team selling too much of our country to large corporate interests:
http://pigdog.org/auto/digital_gar_gar_gar/link/2781.html
government ministerial officials from all over Asia [met] in Tokyo this week to discuss the future of the Internet at the Information Society Regional Conference ... they also had a declaration to "support" Open Source software development and deployment in their governments and regions. ... BUT, there was a little hitch in the plan ... The hitch was that the US delegation -- delegates from the US Department of State, folks, people paid using our tax money -- demanded the removal of the clause for support of Open Source software. Apparently, the US government is OFFICIALLY AGAINST Free Software, and intends to block international efforts to support its use.
A compromise came about where the clause was left in, and the wording was changed from "support" to "encourage", but that's not really the point, here. Why ... is the US Government OPPOSED to Free Software? Free Software is AMERICAN software. The idea STARTED here. We are the HOME and MORAL COMPASS POINT for the Free Software movement around the world.
[bayle: US diplomats did a similar thing in South America a few months ago]
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yeah, Bush seems to be doing allright right now w/r/t Iraq and N. Korea, but there's still a bunch of things he's doing wrong in the foreign arena:
and there are still the mistakes of the past (like, oh, the axis of evil speech perhaps..) (also rejecting Kyoto, withdrawing from the nonproliferation treaty, not listening to the world for a couple of years, cutting funding for programs to monitor Russian nukes (before sept. 11), protectionism, and more). And although he's committed now, I'm still not sure that Iraq was a good fight to pick anyway.
Domestically, I seem to disagree with almost everything he does. He's hugely anti-civil liberties (Ashcroft, all the ridiculous things in the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security bill, and wanting to detain people without rights), is anti-secular government (not content unless he actively funnels federal money to religious organizations), favors the rich, does whatever large corporations want, does huge environmental damage for tiny economic gains (i.e. he's increased logging of national forests in a hundred slippery, behind the scenes ways, the EPA has increased the allowed levels of a bunch of poisons in direct opposition to the scientific research, he wants to ruin that Alaskan place for an irrelevantly small bit of oil), is pro-monopoly (not only did Bush's team throw away the government's chance to get a meaningful settlement in the microsoft case, but our diplomats in South America actively pressure governments down there not to switch from microsoft to open source), and more.
You'd think that being a conservative, at least he'd have one redeeming quality in my eyes (small government), but the man can't even propose a tax cut without making it so egregiously favor the rich that I'm against it.
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2002/1111/web-science-11-13-02.asp
More sites targeted for shutdown BY William Matthews Nov. 13, 2002 Printing? Use this version. Email this to a friend. spacer spacer spacer RELATED LINKS spacer spacer
Software and Information Industry Association
"Energy feels the online squeeze" [Federal Computer Week, Oct. 14, 2002]
"IRS deal cools debate about online services" [Federal Computer Week, Aug. 5, 2002]
"DOE site makes research easier" [Federal Computer Week, Oct. 18, 1999]
Having persuaded the Energy Department to pull the plug on PubScience?, a Web site that offered free access to scientific and technical articles, commercial publishers are taking aim at government-funded information services offering free legal and agricultural data.
"We are looking into a couple of other databases and agencies," said David LeDuc?, public policy director at the Software and Information Industry Association.
After more than a year of pressing Congress and the Bush administration, the SIIA succeeded Nov. 4 in having PubScience? shut down. The association's members include publishing companies that offer some of the same articles for sale over the Internet that the Energy Department was making available for free.
Publishers, including Dutch giant Elsevier Science, argued that PubScience? amounted to improper government-funded competition with commercial information services.
The PubScience? Web site (pubsci.osti.gov) now reads, "PubScience? discontinued (November 4, 2002)" and offers links to other Energy Department Web sites, including one that has a link to Scirus, Elsevier Science's online rival to PubScience?.
"We're delighted with the decision [to shut down PubScience?]," LeDuc? said. "The administration has done a tremendous job of hearing our concerns and responding to what we've always considered to be our legitimate concern."
But library associations, which lobbied to keep PubScience? alive, say shutting down the site is "a very significant loss," and an ominous sign for other government-funded information Web sites.
"The Department of Energy has been doing a lot of information gathering and making information available to the scientific community for decades. For them to drop out is a very, very significant loss," said Susan Martin, a Massachusetts-based academic library consultant.
Closure of the site means that articles from several small scientific publications "that aren't available anywhere else will no longer be available," she said.
Emily Sheketoff, associate executive director of the American Library Association's Washington Office, offered a harsher assessment. "The government recognized a need, designed a way to fill it and when it starts to be successful, the private sector says, 'Get out of the way, let us make a buck.'"
She predicted that the elimination of PubScience? will have a "big financial impact" on research libraries.
Libraries now will have to pay publishing companies for a service they got for free from the Energy Department, Sheketoff said. "As libraries have shrinking resources because local tax bases and state resources are shrinking, it's really tough to put more financial pressure on them."
Scirus and another online source of scientific information, Infotrieve, charge $15 to about $40 per article, according to the American Library Association.
LeDuc? said it is fairer to charge researchers for the articles they use than to charge taxpayers for the cost of running a Web site that makes them available for free.
He said about 10 companies in the SIIA were anxious to eliminate competition from PubScience?, and member companies now want the trade association to challenge other government Web sites.
Two in particular rile SIIA members: "One is law-related, the other has to do with agriculture," LeDuc? said. He declined to identify them further.
One site the SIIA is unlikely to challenge is PubMed?, the National Library of Medicine site ({http://www.pubmed.gov} www.pubmed.gov) that provides free access to millions of medical articles and research papers. PubMed? was established much earlier and has a strong foothold, LeDuc? said. "We have no intention of going after PubMed?."
(a comment from slashdot by FuzzyDaddy?)
When I was a grad student, the taxpayers paid about $750K/year to keep our lab going. We published five or six papers a year.
Those papers were then sent to UNPAID peer reviewers (professors at other universities.) Of course, that's part of their jobs, and a good chunk of their salary comes from the same government grants.
So far so good. I think the publicly funded research has generally been good for the country and humanity as a whole.
Now, the journal we published the articles in holds the copyrights, charges $20 for a reprint, and a subscription is literally tens of thousands of dollars a year. Remember - they didn't do the work, or pay for the research, or even pay the article reviewers.
So this nonsense about "the government paying for something than can be provided privately" is nonsense. The government has paid for 99% of it already, these companies want to profiteer on the back of those government expenditures.
If the government is funding the research, should the citizens have open access to the results?
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