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1. Comment - Norway Looks to Open Source

   (Apr 8, 2006 - 2:16 PM)

   People like rijp are virtually guaranteed to post in a story like this. As someone who lives in the USA, I'd like to apologize for their existence, they are a source of global embarrassment, but that's life.
   
   Unfortunately, in a significant part of the United States, ignorance like this is still considered a virtue, as is blind support for USA corporations, even when they no longer even make their products in the USA.
   
   As others pointed out, Norway is significantly richer than the USA, this is not a question of cheapness, it's a question of controlling your own destiny and giving your population free access to the information they paid taxes to the state to maintain. And to be able to access that information without having to buy extremely expensive software sold by a corporation that does nothing for your country. Paying licensing fees to US corporations and locking yourself into those corporation's proprietary formats is stupid if the long term interests of your own population is a goal of your government, which it should be.
   
   Minnesota is also now considering a new law to ban the use of non-free formats. Eventually the only states using MS stuff will be the ones in the South is my guess.
   
   Re hardware detection, I only had to install video drivers on my debian based distro, everything else was recognized out of the box. How can people talk about hardware support when setting up windows on the same box takes hours, reboots, driver installs, reboots, driver installs, etc? Scanner recognized out of the box, everything. There are things that make linux harder for average users, but on most boxes, if you get the right distro, hardware support isn't one of them for most boxes. Not all, some hardware won't be supported, but most is.