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DSC Demands Linux for the GC

During the recent email outages students attempted to determine solutions for the problems facing information technologies at The Graduate Center, CUNY. One partial solution is to switch the GC's overall operating system from Microsoft to Linux. While not seen as a panacea, Linux may offer a more stable technological environment for the GC. The DSC adopted this resolution at its recent plenary meeting of March 11, 2005:

Be it resolved by the Doctoral Students’ Council at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York;

Whereas open source code such as Linux is freely available to the public, and therefore offers more robust, reliable operating and more options for interoperability;

Whereas Linux is a variant of the UNIX operating system, developed in 1969, in which email has been a standard application since its inception;

Whereas Microsoft, as a monopoly, has become the prime target of crackers' viruses, worms, and Trojans, therefore The Graduate Center should seek to reduce its reliance on Microsoft products (e.g., it should use Mozilla Firefox instead of Microsoft Internet
Explorer);

Whereas many corporations and countries all over the world are switching to Linux-based systems, among them Deutsche Bahn (Germany), the Gendarmerie Nationale (France), the cities of Munich, Germany and Bergen, Norway, the Ministry of Defense in Singapore, and the national government of Brazil;

Whereas major companies such as IBM and Novell have committed themselves to the open source code movement by investing millions of dollars in developing and supporting end-user applications for Linux operating systems;

Whereas the City University of New York is chronically under-funded and can ill afford to continue its association with Microsoft, a monopoly corporation, for technical support;

Whereas The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as a major research institution:

has need of reliable computation and telecommunication systems, has departments full of people capable of coding and troubleshooting in Linux (including but not limited to: Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology), and should emulate the service levels and practices commonly found at other universities;

Therefore be it resolved, it is the sense of the Doctoral Students' Council that The Graduate Center and indeed all of CUNY should switch where at all possible to Linux and/or open source code-based operating systems and applications.