Critical policy failures of the Canadian online Census - I have seen this issue covered in a variety of locations, and is being discussed in a number of different forum. On Thursday there was a Newsforge article by Bruce Bayfield with the headline "Canadian online census discriminates against FOSS". A few citizens have written letters to their member of parliament about this embarrassment to Canada.
I thought I would weigh in on this issue as a technical, policy and security consultant.
First, I do not see this as a FLOSS/Linux vs non-FLOSS/Microsoft issue. I do not believe that the government should be expected to make implementations of software available for every platform that its citizens may use. In fact, I'm not convinced that the government should be involved in providing implementations of software to be installed on peoples computers at all, with this being the major source of my complaint. [Digital Copyright Canada]