Sorry, don't have time to read the whole thread now (will later, I 
promise), but thought
it would be interesting to this list (if not already reported) that 
apparently

Congressman Adam Smith's staff contacted Open Source Public Policy 
advocates
around 6:00pm EDT to say they were flooded by calls from reporters about 
the
letter that sparked this thread. Many staffers of the 67 Congressman who 
signed
are now claiming they didn't know what they were signing and the letter 
is being
withdrawn.

Chalk one up for our side!

Danese

On Wednesday, October 23, 2002, at 08:35 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>>>>>> "Chris" == Chris Maeda <chrismaeda@attbi.com> writes:
>
>     Chris> This may sound like corporate welfare, but it can generate
>     Chris> huge amounts of tax revenue on the back end if the research
>     Chris> is successful.
>
> Specious.  If it's likely to generate "huge" amounts of tax revenue,
> then it's also likely to generate "huge" amounts of profit, and the
> private sector is much better than the government at identifying and
> taking advantage of those.  So it _is_ merely corporate welfare.
>
> This is not an argument against permissive licenses, but government
> funding of proprietary software (as research) is a very bad idea.
>
> If the government is _buying a service_ that's a completely different
> matter.  Drawing the line is hard, but obviously requiring that any
> product used by the government be open-sourced is far beyond what most
> FSBers would consider a reasonable idea for the near to medium term.
> So we do have to make the distinction.
>
> --
> Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     
> http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
> University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 
> 305-8573 JAPAN
>  My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things.  I 
> don't
> have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember.  Scott Gilbert 
> c.l.py