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UK Government Solicits Advice On Open Source
Imran Ghory writes: "The UK government has put out a consultation paper on the use of open source software in government,background research into OSS commisioned by the government is also available, including a comparision of OSS office suites." Check out the formats in which the document is available.
The documents are available in Word and .PDF format. These are pretty industry standard at this point, and .pdf can be read a multitude of ways. What's the problem?
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
How about using the NSA's version of linux in the UK? Its secure and upto government standards. I would love to see the UK move all its boxes over to linux. Lets just hope they don't use NT sys admins!
There's little argument (well, I think so) over what constitutes a proprietary app, but a proprietary service?
.NET and Passport and all that, so my serivces will use that back-end. (Or something like that anyway). Is that too open or closed?
In other words: Is Passport proprietary, just because its MS? I have heard that, for example, I can write my own "plugin" services for
Sounds like they need to neaten up thier terms, else their whole policy becomes -1, Flamebait.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
I invite you to surf to Adobe's site. There is a free (as in no money involved) program available called "Acrobat Reader," which will allow you to read the file quite simply. It's available for every version of Windows, Mac, Linux, a slew of Unices, and even PalmOS. Now please explain your preoccupation with whether it is not open source or not.
Does it really matter? PDF is a copyrighted format (i.e., Adobe owns it). Releasing the source code to it would be absurd --- Acrobat is theirs, why should they not capalitize on it? Capitalism is the foundation on which the American economy is built. Remember our friend Dimitry? He was arrested because he violated that copyright for another Adobe software. Rights are treasured in American society... if we treasure our rights for the ability MP3s (ones we rip from discs we legitimately own, of course), etc... why should Adobe be denied that same right for their own software?
Are you saying that they should be forced to release all their documents in TXT format just because some poor slob can use /usr/local/bin/pico to view it? PDF is an Internet (dare I say industry) standard nowadays.
Should you choose to protest the PDF format, my friend, you can choose to do so. However, the fact that Adobe hasn't placed their company secrets (read: treasured source code) on the dinner table, is hardly a legitimate reason to release useless whining bullshit about Acrobat not being open source.
Grow up. Closed source software sells because it's a valuable, solid product. Otherwise, no one would buy it.
It is quite costly; however, if you can afford the liscensing costs, it is worth every damn penny.
Never write another shell script again. Just point, click, and bam!, you've just instituted a change in the tree!
Just make sure you run your DS Repairs frequently and keep the tree healthy, or else you're asking for trouble!
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
As it stands, they didn't. Babbage went to his grave as a failure despite his pleas for funding, and now the British Government playing second fiddle to some skinny rich geek in Seattle.
Some say that government ownership would have stifled innovation. Maybe there would have been little progress beyond Babbage's designs. Whiners would argue that computers would be saddled with compatibility constraints like the government regulated telephone system (which to this day remains compatible with 19th century handsets).
But so what? What would any true geek prefer to have: (A) a gleaming, multi-ton steam powered machine sporting thousands of shiny steel gears, or (B) a stupid beige box cowering under their desk? The answer is obviously A.
The economics of scale has been directed at the wrong target. Any nerd can easily afford lots of the ugly plastic boxes we call computers, but today even a version 1 Difference Engine would be beyond most people's means. It didn't have to turn out like this. It's a shame, because just like a fine car, chix dig that kind of hardware. (Ada Lovelace, for example. Not bad.) Chix cannot relate to tiny silicon gadgets. I had to expend a lot of extra effort courting my wife using my wits and personality because my computers meant nothing to her.
I place the blame for the current sorry state of affairs in computing technology squarely on the British government's shortsightedness. Right now, they are just trying to deflect attention from the fact that they dropped the ball.
A company wants a program that draws a triangle. Microsoft(tm) Triangle(tm) draws a triangle. You can specify what color you want it to be.
An open source program draws a triangle. In addition to allowing you to choose the color, you can specify whether or not it's a right triangle, and if not, the various degrees.
Company purchaser looks at options and says "Well, the open source one is way better, but who knows if they'll be around in a year or two. Hell, let's go with the company we know will be there."
The root of all evil is accountability. With the Microsoft(tm) product, there will be a corporate entity to blame for any problems. With the open-source solutions, there's no guarantee that the producer will exist in the future.
So they'll always choose the Microsoft(tm) option. That's just the way it is in the real business world. Even if there's no possibility of recovering losses from the vendor, at least there will always (?) be that vendor to blame/approach. And in the off (heh) chance that there are others with the same problems, the likelihood of finding a solution will be greater.
Look at the computer predecessor, the typewriter. Sure, there have always been cheaper, and probably better-feature-laden typewriters, but the IBM sold so well because the suits always knew there would always be a big corporation behind them.
Point being... there's no way open-source will work until there's an established set of software requirement standards. We should require that software meet standards prior to being allowed in the marketplace. Unfortunately, there is no such requirement. Hence, we have what we have.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
I'd commend a read of the cited QinetiQ Report cited as background to the current consultation. In fact, I'm quite shocked at how well considered it is; I'm sure it will help readers seeking to convince their management to consider the adoption of OSS.
Its more than easy to diss Govtalk for its many failings - such as the failure to embrace text and RTF when it has the opportunity; hotchingly bad HTML on the website, &c.
But there's a great deal of good going on, too; not least the RFC process of which this consultation is a part; and the strong support for XML in the eGovernment Interoperability framework (itself a coherent position statement).
As food for further debate, here are the main recommendations under which the current consultation was predicated:
1. OSS is indeed the start of a fundamental change in the software infrastructure marketplace, and is not a hype bubble that will burst.
2. Within five years, 50% of the volume of the software infrastructure market could be taken by OSS.
3. OSS's position in large servers (e.g. those managing massive multi-user databases), such as those that underpin many large Government procurements, will grow from its current position of near zero penetration, to a position where OSS is a viable option, within 2 - 3 years.
4. Within the developed world, we as yet see no sign that OSS will become a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows, for user's (general purpose) desktop machines in the corporate or home PC markets. However, OSS on the desktop may soon become a significant player in the developing world. For these reasons we recommend against any preference for OSS on the desktop, but also recommend that this issue be reassessed by the end of 2002, by which time early trials of the use of OSS desktops may have generated sufficient evidence to warrant a reassessment.
5. We see no benefit that the Government would gain from expressing a general preference for OSS within server infrastructures.
6. The Government could clarify its position as to whether there are circumstances in which Microsoft products are to be preferred.
7. The Government could consider publishing policy as to how the risk of lock-in to proprietary protocols is to be managed.
8. As yet it is not possible to predict that OSS will make a major contribution to the software applications market.
9. Many of the Government's risks that arise from over-dependence on proprietary protocols and data formats for interoperability can be controlled by the selective use of open data standards.
10. The existence of an OSS reference implementation of a data standard has often accelerated the adoption of such standards, and we recommend that the Government consider selective sponsorship of OSS reference implementations.
11. The rise of OSS, offers the possibility that non-US players will find it easier to influence the future direction of IT infrastructure technology.
12. The Government should consider using OSS as the default exploitation route for UK Government funded software.
13. The differences between OSS and proprietary software are not a major factor in either improving or degrading the vulnerability of a nation's IT infrastructure.
14. We recommend that the Government obtain full rights to bespoke software that it procures - this includes any customisation of off-the-shelf software packages.
15. The Open Source model offers a new paradigm for funding software in communities-of-interest (e.g. Health and Education). The Government could consider running pilot projects to test the viability of the OSS approach to such software.
16. We recommend that the Medical Records data standard be examined by appropriate domain experts for possible inclusion in the e-GIF.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Aren't there open-source apps that can read Word documents and PDF files (Ghostscript and StarOffice)?
And more to the point, why should we expect someone presenting an open-source alternative to a predominantly Windows-based audience to present it in non-Windows formats? Are we really that zealous, that we expect organizations to convert completely to open-source alternatives before they can even mention Linux on their website? And didn't we just cover this subject?
I grew up in the rural South, and I remember folk who considered it acceptable to use racial slurs when in a whites-only group, because it was safe to assume that most everyone would agree, and those that didn't would remain silent. Thankfully, times have changed—now I have to read Slashdot to find that kind of intolerance.
If we're going to act like a bunch of militant fundamentalists, I think I might just sit this year out. Please wake me when the zealots stop screaming in the hallway.
http://access.adobe.com/simple_form.html
will automagically translate any PDF document into HTML. It uses a perl engine, too! :)
The story had 89 replies in 2.5 hours, half of them don't sound like the writers bothered to look at the page at all (let alone the document). I expect a government server to handle that kind of load. Last but not least - this story is not really a thrilling must-read. Outside of the UK only the most rabid Open Source advocates and Microsoft astroturfers will bother to read it. But if it makes you happy to think that IIS is the reason this isn't slashdoted yet ...
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Nobody has ever sued MS because one of their products was faulty. No software from MS comes with any guarantee of usability whatsoever. If there is a CIO someplace in this world who thinks that they can hold MS accountable then by all means let us know who this collosal idiot is so that we can sell our stocks.
The idea of a CEO or a CIO commiting shareholders money to sue MS because of a defect in one of their software is just too funny. It has never been done and it will never happen.
Please people this kind of fud is old hat and stupid. Think of new ones.
War is necrophilia.
So far we have seen a futile debate about open source document formats. Get it into your head, these guys are not looking to go the hair shirt, I shall not use closed source software route.
The real issue is whether HMG should start adopting procurement guidelines that require the code they have written for them to be made available as open source. In some cases this would be a very bad idea, in others very good.
The issue for the UK is that they can have a much bigger influence on the development of OSS than they can on the development of Windows.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Guys, reality check here. This is a consultation document written by a civil servant. At the same time we have Tony Blair schmoozing with Bill Gates in order to look good. Hell, the National Health Service recently announced a huge (hundred of millions IIRC) deal with Microsoft for a "unified buying scheme", and one of the sweeteners was that Gates would come and address a conference on IT in the NHS. You have to remember that the UK government is motivated largely by vanity, and that a lot of excellent civil servants have been sidelined because they upset that vanity.
During the last election campaign Blair paid a visit to Gates, who was in the UK promoting XP. It was very hard to see who was exploiting who for their own purposes.
Although this is a significant bit of consultation from within the government's paid service, there are much weightier reasons why we might end up with a government here which embraces free software - like Gates forgetting Blair's birthday or something. While govenment agencies require submissions to be in "industry standard" formats (i.e. Word or Excel documents) we've got an awfully long way to go.
Obligatory disclaimer - I'm a British Conservative, which influences my view on Blair's Britain a smidge.
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
Of particular interest is the recommendation that if there is a value case, government departments should be free to go with Free Software (as opposed to being tied to software from "real companies"). This hard-headed value-for-money analysis the only way to check the political and marketing muscle of the software corps. The truth is that much of the corporately-developed software available offers very little additional value over the corresponding open source equivalent.
Banging the drum for Open Source is great, but it's when procurers say, "show me the added value or give me a discount", that people like Microsoft pay attention.
"Well, put a stake in my heart and drag me into sunlight."
Fine, they'll consider OSS for new stuff. Remember the UK's existing "e-government" that is only accessible via Windows? The policy should mandate the revision of all existing facilities to use open standards.
I have saved the PDF of the report as PostScript with xpdf for printing or download here (100k).
http://www.fibrespeed.net/~mbabcock/mirrors/ukgo vt oss.ps (300k) for people who don't have compressed file support.
http://www.fibrespeed.net/~mbabcock/mirrors/ukgovt oss.html (170k) for HTML converted by Star Office from the MS Word document.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
That doesn't follow at all. If one implementation is good enough, there is no need for a competitor. Acrobat Reader is free, perfectly good enough for what it does, produced by the people who define the Acrobat format, and has no glaring missing features. What would be the point in producing a "competitor"?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Bah. Like it or not, .pdf is an industry standard. If you want to play with non-standard setups, you have to accept the price, which is that you won't be able to do everything the standard-conforming people can. This is your problem, not theirs.
Do you also think the government should publish this paper translated for Chinese and Indian audiences? There are millions more of them out there who can't read it than there are people using the systems you mention. But the simple fact is that they are not the target audience, so there's no reason for someone to spend large amounts of effort catering to them.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Use common sense on the desktop - people can still use Windows and get the power of linux off the server - ssh client tools are available for secure access.
Don't try replacing Windows on the desktop...you will find that the vast majority of people aren't nearly as obsessed with monopoly politics as they are with using their favorite plugins.
So let me get this straight. The UK government takes a genuine step toward investigating Open Source, and the best /. can do is carp on their publishing formats? And we wonder why the Open Source community is treated with contempt or disdain by so many professional/government outfits...
You might try actually reading the article before you make such comments. It wasn't an RFC, it was a detailed, objective and well thought-out analysis of the state of OSS today, and its potential uses within UK government. Its most significant conclusions seem to be that there is potential there for some applications, but it isn't viable yet, and for other applications, there's no particular likelihood that it will become so.
Moving on, I find it strange that so many people here seem to feel that because this discusses OSS, it should be published in an "open" format, and that PDF format is not open. Now, first up, PDF is about as open as you can be without going to absurdly low levels. There is at least one good, free reader available for all major platforms, and the specification is published by Adobe, as has been detailed elsewhere in this thread.
Furthermore, given the target audience for the paper, using an "open" format is pretty irrelevant anyway. They have no obligation whatsoever to spend large amounts of effort converting it to a format for the 0.01% of people out there who can't already read Acrobat format because they use very unusual systems. If you don't like it, switch to a better system, and quit complaining. Your whole argument supports another of the major conclusions in the paper: the OSS world isn't yet compatible enough with the rest of the world to be practical as a routine alternative.
And yes, Acrobat format is a standard used for publication, because it's popular, reliable, effective and useful. That is currently more than can be said for any of the alternatives being proposed on this thread (ASCII and HTML variants aren't anywhere near up to rendering that document accurately, and XSL:FO is a technology that won't be widely used for several years). In that context, the UK government (and many others who publish papers on-line) have adopted PDF format as a de-facto standard, and as far as I can see, no-one has yet suggested a better idea.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I wrote:
Sorry; I screwed up big-time there. I read both documents about half an hour before posting that and had forgotten about the original RFC by the time I'd read through the background and the rest of this thread. The swipe quoted above about reading the article was out of line. My apologies.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I can think of two actual problems:
#1 - Lack of bandwidth. Unless it's a corporate site, they're generally running off limited bandwidth, or on a host with bandwidth throttles.
#2 - Dynamic content poorly developed.
Any modern computer running a 300Mhz processor or better will saturate a T3 line on static content.
But if you use dynamic content, and you have not done any load testing, you can start hitting other limits of the hardware beyond bandwidth. If you really haven't done any testing at all, the whole system can fall down and go boom because of poor code, memory leaks, and so forth.
Bull. I have a current version of Acrobat on every machine I use at home and at work, and I don't think I've ever downloaded a 5MB install. I certainly haven't done it once a year for every machine where I use it. For a start, the current version is on the cover disk of almost every PC magazine I've ever bought.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Rubbish. The PDF format is well documented by Adobe and the information is publicly available. The details have even been posted in this thread. Non-Adobe software that both renders and creates PDF documents is available, too. I can't see how your quoted statement above could be more wrong.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I was able to view the DOC file using StarOffice 6 BETA and the PDF file inside my Netscape 6.2.1 Browser using acroread from Adobe.
It took a little work to get acroread to work properly - 15min - but now it's working great. I prefer PDFs. heh
At any rate, it looks like the UK is going to save alot of Pounds and get great software to boot.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
.doc is not a standard.
.pdf, then it wouldn't be a standard either. As it is (because there are independant ways to create, edit, and view them, and because Adobe isn't a monopoly) the .pdf is a standard. So being a proprietary API doesn't prevent something from becoming a standard.
.doc extension to all of them. This can create as much, or more, confusion as your example of an independant product using the same extension (which has also happened). And the latest MSWord can't necessarily read the older formats. This was broken for a period back around the release of ?? was it Word 97? I believe that this was quickly patched, but we got one of the broken versions, and it caused considerable confusion. But it was their right. Nobody can accuse them of breaking the standard, because .doc isn't a standard. It's just a file spec. A proprietary file spec.
Proprietary API's are not standards, and neither are proprietary file specs. Sorry. They just aren't. They are API's (or file specs). And they do cause random amounts of confusion. And that's part of why they aren't standards.
If Adobe could at will change the specs of the
Microsoft uses several different Word formats, and gives the
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
See section 2.7.3 page 15 of the QinetiQ regarding the failure of the W3C to properly establish HTML standards!!!!
The W3C tools can't tell the difference between what is mark up language and what it marks up, regarding URLs. But most browsers can (if not all).
No, I didn't. I did not refer to "PC Magazine", which I assume is a specific publication where you are. I referred to "every PC magazine" (note the lowercase m), which in my case covers at least five or six publications over the past couple of years, from a variety of publishers. Pretty much every cover disk I've seen in that time had the latest version of Acrobat Reader on it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Ambiguous statements. Fair use. UK law. You. Have. No. Case. So sue me.
I'm sorry, but that is completely and utterly irrelevant. Acrobat is widely accessible, simply because the vast majority of people who want to read it can do so. You can use any other metric you like, but that doesn't change the fact that everyone I know, from my co-workers to my parents, can read an Acrobat file trivially. And that includes people running PCs, Macs and Linux.
Of course it's targetted at printing; that's what most people are going to do with it. Very few people read long documents on-line.
HTML is little more than a poor cousin to a man page. It is a bastardised mark-up language, based on ill-planned roots, that's grown beyond its usable potential. XML is a vastly superior approach for genuine mark-up of structured data. PDF, PostScript, and newer technologies like XSL:FO are better choices for representing formatted documents. HTML is stuck somewhere in the middle, carried along only by momentum, as it has been for several years now.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Yes, I'm afraid that's true. It always has been, and it probably always will be. If you try to break away from contemporary standards, you will face an uphill battle; such is the price you pay for being on the leading edge. There is a reason most people stick to standards, and this thread is a prime example of it. (And yes, it does mean that technologies with potential can get left behind, but if they aren't compatible with the rest of the world, that's the risk they run.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"Yes, bow down to the status quo. You are not worthy of the knowing the secret inner workings of the holy .doc format, yet you must be compatible to have a chance. Too bad for you, you peon. Muahahahah!"
Who the fuck are you anyway, Bill Gates? Or do you just get to lick his ass clean after every crap?
I'm sorry, but you did seem to interpret "PC magazine" (generic term) as "PC Magazine" (specific publication), and then proceed to have a go on that basis. Given that your original premise was wrong, your argument was somewhat flawed.
I accept your point that not all PC magazines come with CDs, but I was simply showing that for many people, the much-maligned 5MB download is not actually necessary at all.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.