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U.S. Asked to Put Purchasing Power to Good Use
James Love writes "Today Ralph Nader and I wrote U.S. Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch
Daniels to ask the federal government to use its power as a big consumer to
address competition issues in the market for PC client software. These are
some of the practices we want OMB to examine: OMB is asked to provide information on federal expenditures for Microsoft products, determine if a software "monoculture"
makes the federal government more vulnerable to computer viruses or unauthorized access to federal computers, and to consider a number of strategies to use the US government's purchasing power to promote competition and make Microsoft behave; OMB is asked to consider if Microsoft should be required (as a matter of procurement policy) to fully disclose the file formats of its office productivity and multimedia programs, so that the data created in such programs could be reliably read by non-Microsoft software; OMB is asked to consider if it should place a cap of the market share for any one vendor of PC client software, and have the size of the cap depend upon Microsoft's willingness to open up its interface information, or port its MS Office products to additional platforms; OMB is also asked to consider if it would be more efficient to buy code for office productivity products (and release into the public domain), rather than spend billions to lease software."
Also, you may call it monoculture but I call it interoperable standards compliance. Get with the program.
As I have mentioned before, I work for the Department of the Navy, and I have seen some deals in progress around here that perhaps is worthy of some scrutiny.
Recently the DoN signed a contract with a company called EDS to essentially transfer all ownership of the Navy and Marine Corps intranet over to this private-sector company. When this transition occurs, all but a few servers, and all DoN workstations and networking hardware will become EDS property. EDS will be replacing it with their own, and sell the old equipment, surely at a profit.
Aside from the several million dollars EDS stands to get from the government contract, they stand to make a pretty penny on some absurd service contracts, let alone what they are getting for selling off our old equipment.
I suspect this is another instance of back-scratching (you know, "You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours) that makes no business sense at all. Perhaps this warrants some closer attention as well.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
M$, Sun, Oracle, IBM, Apple, HPaq, Adobe, Dell ... there are lots of big-ass companies out there, providing hardware and software and combinations thereof, that are capable of meeting government needs. The fact that the government has gone whole-hog to M$ software (and buys its hardware from companies like Dell that are basically marketing divisions of Wintel Inc.) has nothing to do with those companies having "proven themselves able to support the task." It has everything to do with technological illiteracy on the part of the people making the purchasing decisions and the enormous lobbying power of Microsoft's money.
I'd love to see an open-source, low-cost-hardware government computing world, and maybe at some point in the not too distant future we will. (Certainly other countries are showing much more initiative than the US in this direction; maybe if the US bureaucracy gets over its NIH syndrome, they can learn something from, e.g., the Germans.) But failing that, there's no reason at all we can't have machines from IBM and Sun and Apple and Dell and HPaq and whoever else happily coexisting in large-scale computing environments, whether governmental or corporate -- no reason we can't, and plenty of reasons, both economic and technical, why we should.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I'm glad to see that this kind of scrutiny is becoming more popular. It has been kind an annoying irony that the Justice Dept has been suing M$ while the US Govt. continues to buy their products.
There's always talk among our elected officials that government spending needs to be controlled and that competitive bidding and cost analysis should be used to arrive at the most fiscally responsible solution. Of course, anybody who has seen the money spent through the defense budget knows that there is a lot of room for improvement.
I'm not real optimistic that this will lead to reforms, but at least it may bring the huge amount of money wasted each year into the spotlight. Remember that our elected officials don't make decisions without substantial money and lobbying involved, and in Microsoft's case that expense will be passed right back to the taxpayers.
Still, with the high-profile government endorsements of Open source in Peru, Germany, and other places, the pressure is increasingly on Microsoft to justify their huge cost and diminishing returns. If nothing else, maybe we'll get a better deal from them.
I'd like to see this as a win for OSS. As a government contractor constantly looking for ways to bring linux into my workplace, I can tell you that there is still a long way to go before the government rolls out OSS or any non-Microsoft product on a broad level.
Things like Networthiness Policies, Security, and red tape make it difficult. Especially when you have mutiple agencies under different chains-of-command, so don't think that when "The Federal Government approves use of OSS" comes around that the individual fiefdoms will be mass migrating over to Linux/Apache/whatever.
Somewhere in the US Government, people are running Apache as their production webserver. My agency only uses IIS, Apache is not on the 'networthiness' list for this location, so no Apache for me. It's great that the NSA has made their own hardened version of Linux, but here, the security guys says only WindowsNT (not even 2000 yet) is the only approved OS secure enough for our network. Now, multiply this across ALL the federal/state/local agencies.
Even if it was mandated for the government to use OSS, it would take YEARS of retraining people to use this stuff, keeping in mind that alot of the government systems are still running Novell 3.x.
The way to win government (which is my approach), is to influence your specific area, and push it from the bottom to the top. It's one thing to sit there and say "Noone should use default IIS/2000 installs for a production environment". It's a totally different thing to review the existing policies and change them, document them, sending them through committe, and then deploying. (Believe me, it sucks.)
On the other hand, things like this help, another government law that has really helped OSS is Section 508 (The accessability laws). At first, I hated them, tons of pages and web apps still need to be rewritten - how does this benefit open source? 508 happens to read almost word for word with the W3C guidelines, which means that alot of government pages and applications now work in Konq/Mozilla. Good Stuff.
This is also an excellent time for the US-based portion of our community to follow up with our congressional representatives on this issue. Remember, both the House and the Senate place very little stock in email. If you want to get their attention, use either snail-mail or fax, as detailed above. Snail-mail only costs about $1, fax is even cheaper.
- Go here and get your ZIP+4 code.
- Go here and identify your Congressperson.
- When you click on the "Contact My Representative" button, you will be taken to a form. Ignore it. Instead, click on the link for your Representative and go to their homepage. Hopefully, they will have contact information someplace where you can find it. Copy it into your favorite word-processor.
- Go here and identify your Senators. Again, we hope that they make it easy to find their contact information.
- If you are thinking ahead, save three "empty" letters, addressed to each of the above. This will save time the next time you need to write.
- Use your word processor to write an essay explaining your position. Be verbose. Copy this into each of the three letters you prepared above.
- If you found any fax numbers (and your computer can print-to-fax!) send copies of your letter that way. Otherwise, print it out and send it by regular mail.
Here's a suggested outline for the text of your letter (and, no, I'm not going to write it for you, staffers can spot a form letter a mile away):Nothing for 6-digit uids?
If you think that's bad, you should know that the government is moving more and more towards storing documents in Adobe .PDF format.
It's not the same as MS, but certainly every bit as proprietary.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
...unless you are under the naive belief that a government that is an entranched monopoly is still constrained by the forces of individual freedom.
Look, it's really simple. If you don't like Microsoft products, don't buy them (most people pirate them anyway). There are now (finally) enough open source alternatives. If you don't like coke, don't buy coke. If you don't like Ford, buy chevy. But don't be a dumbass and expect the federal government (the root of all evil) to make your moral judgements for you, while you empower these companies with your consumer dollars.
But I don't want the government using my tax dollars to achieve that (except in antitrust and other legal manners).
Yes, it does suck that the government has to "get involved", but at the same time, I pay ALOT of money in taxes.
The government should not force, anyone to do anything, but as a stakeholder(taxpayer), I'd be damn pissed if the government is spending ~$800 per server for Win2k, ~$400 per person on Office without even considering the alternatives.
Example, at my agency someone wanted to spend ~$3000 for FTP Server Software and clients. They were going to do it too, until myself and some others mentioned that free software would be perfect in that role. (Hell, I think W2K comes with an ftp server).
This is not just the government though, businesses do it too - PHBs assume that expensive software is better, and the more money they spend, the better "product" the will get.
It's up to us (OSS advocates), to educate our bosses and the people that make decisions that OSS makes sense in alot of places. And don't just say it, PROVE IT, deploy it, and document the performance/costs benefits. At the same time, integrate their existing software that they've already paid for instead of trying to convert everything all at once.
A feature is an objective attribute such as "provides variable-sized fonts". It is not something like "must be identical to MS Office". Just as a bid for cars will specify horsepower, gas mileage, etc. and cannot say "must be identical to a Ford."
Something like StarOffice or even OpenOffice would satisfy the needs 99% of all government workers. We're talking about basic office documents and memos, nothing exotic.
Surely there must be actual RFPs somewhere, if only as a formality to satisfy the law, that end up being won by MS. Who bids on these, and why does MS always win? Even if you sold them OpenOffice for $1 a copy, perhaps enhancing it (under GPL) to add some arcane feature or two that currently only MS has in order to satisfy the RFP, you could become quite wealthy. If it meets the requirements of the RFP and has a lower price, the government must accept the bid, in order to minimize the cost to the taxpayers.
Governements departments and large businesses BUY software and own the source code, except for PC OSs.
They should be forced by law to BUY and not lease all the software they run on their machines. Stop all acquisitions of any licences. They can only renew licences on software that's already installed.
I've written a lot of code for large businesses and for municipal, state/provincial and federal govermnents in two countries. The only time they DON'T get the source code is on code from Microsoft or on some packaged code running on Windows.
All mainframe, mini/departmental, proprietary code has to be compiled onto the target host as part of the migration process from purchasing/development, testing, integration and production/deployment.
If you're a purchaser shelling out a couple of million for a custom software package, you damn well better get the source or you'd better not have a board or an electorate to answer to.
Requiring the purchase of the code, not just licences, will cause a major change in the way Microsoft works but not in the way the rest of the world works.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I agree that MS should not be forced to do anything particular about their file formats; they (should be / are) free to make them as obfuscated or open, efficient or ludicrously wasteful as they'd like.
That said, in the interest of responsible stewardship, anyone spending tax dollars (extracted by intimidation, spent much more freely) should be obligated to spend it well and frugally. Open file formats should simply be one of the requirements to describe intelligent tax-paid purchase of any software.
So, force should not enter into it; instead, those people charged with advancing the general welfare and flush with their extortion money should at least have the courtesy to actually avoid reducing the choices of citizens, or spending money on extravagant purchases. Choosing a single-vendor file format is risky on both counts.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
report any 'piracy' they've seen in the government
I was never once in a unit that had licenses for all its software. Once I was the information management officer for an entire battalion. I keep all the software licenses in a big binder and for any software that didn't have licenses, I wrote official requests for the funds to purchase them and kept those in the binder too. That was me covering my own ass.
There's actually a funny story here. I was short several licenses of Win95 but nobody sold those anymore. I called Microsoft and told them I wanted X Win95 licenses. They offered to sell me WinME or Win2K but these machines didn't have the horsepower. Finally, they offered to sell me licenses for windows 98 at, get this *higher prices* than ME because "they no longer supported it." So I paid *several* *hundred* *dollars* more of *your* *tax* *money* than I should have and what did I actually receive in the mail? I single piece of paper from MS with the words "authorized to use X copies of Windows 98" written on it.
I gave MS money to print me a sheet of paper. It didn't even have the laser hologram on it!
Ah those were the days.
At least I was able to keep licenses from machines that we threw away. As I was leaving, we were buying new machines that came with Win2K and had the license on a sticker on the box. No more binders! Now when you throw away the machine you throw away the license too.
(Context for mods: The U.S. government specifies what software it buys based on a list of required features and then lets companies bid. But sometimes, it simply reads the requirements from a particular package's manual to get around the bidding laws. WordPerfect's "show codes" feature is an example of such a requirement.)
I miss "show codes"
In this case, Microsoft could claim that a form of Show Codes exists in Office as well. Just save as HTML ;-)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yes, very clever indeed. I sure fell for it, and it took me a minute to figure it out.
But what I'd like to know is why the sig doesn't appear under IE. In fact, comparing the source produced by both browsers, its not the same. Its like IE ignores the <ul> tag and everything within it.
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]