"The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and it's high time open source squeaked."

Dana Blankenhorn

"Most procurement experts believe 15-20% of purchased materials and services can be saved (billions of dollars in a large company) by centralizing procurement and leveraging a far-flung corporation's buying power. Despite this expert opinion, backed by numerous examples, many medium and large companies maintain decentralized, splintered, uncoordinated procurement operations."

Gene Richter, former Chief Procurement Officer at IBM

"The majority of open source attention goes to the hobbyist market and large enterprises, and it's much more difficult for smaller companies to find what they need."

Maria Winslow

"The federal government neither prevents nor encourages open source adoption...but effective exploitation will require clear and well-communicated policy and proactive education - Government needs to seize OSS opportunities through clear and well-communicated policies and by being proactive without being provocative. There are numerous examples of effective use of OSS within the public sector today but lack of clear OSS policy is creating fear, uncertainty and doubt about its legitimacy preventing optimal exploitation."

Earlier this month, the European Commission issued a press release stating that it "will take a more pro-active approach to its own use of open source" and that "for all new development, where deployment and usage is foreseen by parties outside of the Commission Infrastructure, open source software will be the preferred development and deployment platform." While this is a strong stance regarding the use of open source, the European Commission still considers itself to be "an early adopter of open source".

"So imagine a mirror
Bigger than the room it was placed in
Imagine my wish for a future
that cannot hold my wish
Imagine the want to hold a rod
that cannot hold the fish
Imagine a rod that cannot hold the fish"
 

Paul Heaton, The Beautiful South

"It won't be long before open access is old hat, taken for granted by a new generation of tools and services that depend on unrestricted access to research literature and data. As those tools and services come along, they will be the hot story. But historians will note that they all depend on open access and that open access was not easily won."

Peter Suber

"It is, I think, an elementary principle of copyright law that an author has no copyright in ideas but only in his expression of them. The law of copyright does not give him any monopoly in the use of the ideas with which he deals or any property in them, even if they are original. His copyright is confined to the literary work in which he has expressed them. The ideas are public property, the literary work is his own."

Justice Thorson P. in Moreau v. St. Vincent

"Data constitute a critical national resource, one whose value increases as the data become more readily and broadly available."

Preserving Scientific Data on Our Physical Universe:
A New Strategy for Archiving the Nation's Scientific Information Resources