The Open Under

The misleadingly named Initiative for Software Choice is up in arms about a South Australian proposal to preference Open Source in government procurement. I debated Jim DeLong on this several months back, and I'm certainly open to being proven wrong on this one, so it'd be interesting to see how some large-scale test cases turn out.

Comments

[JDM]

This is just an attempt by open source backers to use the government to further their own end, just like every other lobby. If being able to read file formats 30, 50, or 100 years down the road is a public good, that should be a requirement of the contract. If that's easier to do with OSS, then use OSS, if there is a propietary solution that fits the bill, use that.

[Sandy]

Jim DeLong makes some points typical of misunderstandings about the GPL propogated by the Initiative for Software Lock-in. The GPL only requires a "derivative work" be GPL, and it is widely accepted that simply using a separate library of GPLed code doesn't make your product infringe. Proprietary licenses (such as SCO's Unix license) prevent derivative work entirely, so it's hard to see the advantage of proprietary software in regard to his concerns about the GPL. At least with the GPL you can make some software and sell it. Furthermore, BSD-style licenses do NOT make code "in the public domain," they simply have fewer restrictions on their license than the GPL. Anybody who's even read articles on law, let alone read books or studied law, should know the difference.

Lastly, the GPL has nothing to do with the debate of procurement in government. Governments by and large are software USERs, not software creators.

That being said, preferencing Open Source is not necessarily a good thing, except by extension. What we need is to preference open formats. As long as data is in proprietary formats, whole libraries of taxpayer-produced data will disappear. I can just see the CIA now, "Sure we'll comply with the FOIA. I hope you can read CIASpyWriter 3.7 triple-encrypted format! Muhahahahah! Hey, we're not encrypting it, it's the Proprietary Format owned by ConHugeCo. Talk to them, not us."

If you want some fun, try reading WP 5.1 files with the latest version of MS Office. Oops! Can't do it. Now, try opening an RTF (Rich Text Format) document from the same time period (early 90's). It opens just fine! Why can Microsoft support one and not the other? Even MS prefers Open Formats, as long as they're the ones having to pay licensing fees.

For you, however, and your tax money, well, you'd better pay them, according to the Initiative for Software Expense. I don't care if they use CIASpyWriter 3.7 as long as they keep their repositories in RTF, PDF, or ASCII text so future generations have a prayer at reading what was written. MS Word .doc format, however, will be obsolete in 10 years (it's already tough to open MS for Mac files prior to version 6, and that was about 10 years ago).

There is one advantage Open Source software, as opposed to formats. As one town in Virginia found out, a proprietary company can come along and demand you either account for every license you have bought for every copy of, say, MS Office, and you'll have to spend your budget doing that or spend your budget "settling" with them. Effectively, they can come and raid your budget and extort more money whenever they want. Could you imagine if furniture manufacturers went in demanding to see receipts for every item in a government office every 6 months?

[Anonymous]

The second point, "promote research by giving us money" lead to the 1990s autonomous intelligent agent crowd. That crowd filled tens of workshops with pipedreams, at the Australian taxpayer expense, and is now subsumed by more reasonable work in low-level 'insectoid-like' intelligence.
Market forces would have skipped directly to the latter field. Instead, the bubble promoted a decade of AI projection of its failure into distributed systems research.

[Adam Soudure]

I am not in favour in forcing governments to use Open Source software, but I am in favour of having them at least consider it. One of the biggest considerations in storage and retrieval of statuatory data is longevity. The use of closed, proprietary file formats makes this is a difficult challenge, to say the least. I would like to see at the very least a move to open *standards*, where multiple applications can read and write the same data.

If this involves the overwhelming use of OSS, then so be it. The same goes for proprietary software. Let the public organisations choose which applications are best for them, but lets keep the standards open, so we can continue to use the data in generations to come.

This is one of the biggest beefs I have with Microsoft. They "embrace and extend" standards, making interoperability an absolute nightmare for a system integrator (like myself) and their customers. They are, however, by no means the only offender in this regard.

[Bill G.]

No one has to buy Microsoft. They do it because it's better. That's FREEDOM. Open Source and Standards are a creeping form of communism that poses the greatest threat to the free world, free minds and free markets everywhere. Open Source is no less a threat than terrorism. In fact, that's how terrorists operate, by using Open Source Software. They must be stopped NOW. I laud what SCO is doing to save our great nation from this evil menace and am absolutely disgusted that Hit & Run is powered by MT. It is despicable and treasonous.

[Smith Whitney]

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DATE: 02/27/2004 08:07:59
Just because there's a pattern doesn't mean there's a purpose.