People in Congress have it tough.
They’re expected to deal with every new topic that comes down the pike, from regulating securitized credit swaps to beefing up cybersecurity, whether they’ve had any previous experience with it or not. Of course, there’s never a shortage of people who want to educate them, but the “educators” with the greatest access are likely to be lobbyists. And when one paid advocate is promoting one action, political physics dictates that another highly paid individual in somebody else’s pocket will be promoting an equal and opposite action. Soon, all potential solutions become obscured by a fog of business propaganda.
What’s a poor legislator (and her staff) to do?
Good question. There’s been plenty of fog on Capitol Hill about free and open source software (FOSS) for a decade now, and that’s hardly surprising. In the beginning, most big software companies were a’gin it, and any government agency CIO allowing a useful bit of FOSS to find a home on the servers she supervised was not likely to advertise that fact.
