Chris Sells has a piece up describing his testimony before Oregon Lawmakers regarding Oregon HB 2892, aka "the open source law". It seems like this law has received a large amount of uncritical acknowlegement, but Chris outlines the clause that highlighted his dissent, namely that government employees "Provide justification whenever a proprietary software product is acquired rather than open source software". At first reading, this sounds like it's placing an extra burden on employees wanting to implement closed source solutions. Practically speaking, it's a matter of fudging the numbers the way the estimator wanted them to turn out. Practically, I think it would place a bias towards open source vendors, but not free software. I see quite a bit of "open source" pixie dust being wafted around in the name of purchasing a software package that's based on Open Source. Which probably explains why "At the end of the hearing, the chairman of the committee called out some names of the most credible, suit-wearing fellows from each side of the debate to form a working group to come up with a bill that the committee could actually consider submitting for a vote."

Thanks to Peter Provost for the link.