I appreciate some of the answers to the questions I initially posed to Kenji. I work on the campaign for governor (guess which one). SO I suppose we are the people "taking bribes," from large corporations who will subsequently sell us software packages with proprietary licenses. In point of fact the SW industry is new to the lobbying game and while I know a lot of senior microsofties are giving to republicans, so far there has been no huge tech donations in Oregon - for good or ill. I am personally interested in the open source movement. I think it has very interesting prospects for most of the "intellectual property" market. The initial point I raised with Kenji is one that Dion raises here: >Right now there are no incentives to be better than anyone else other than maybe >personal pride (mine). In the private sector we re-engineer because we think it will give us competitive advantage. The market then tells us whether this is true or not. In government, we can re-engineer but the criteria of success in government are different. I guess the classic case is that when a department is more efficient and doesn't use all the resources it's allocated: it gets that money cut. So, open source or not, how do we encourage innovation in gov't and, more critically, how do we evaluate the success of the innovation? I am sure you know about the difficulties of implementing new strategies for tackling old problems in a bureaucracy. What things can we poor political hacks do to get innovation working for us in gov't? Neil Kerr
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