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."

Comments

Questionable Contracts at the DoN

[goldspider]

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.

Procurement is half the battle.

[reaper20]

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.

It's about time

[vrmlguy]

With several other governments (Peru, Germany, Mexico, China) deciding that open source software makes better sense than closed, I've been wondering if/when the US would follow suit. I'm under no illusion that this letter will trigger an immediate change of OMB policies; Microsoft has too many lobbyists for that to happen overnight. However, it will serve to get the ball rolling.

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.

1. Go here and get your ZIP+4 code.
2. Go here and identify your Congressperson.
3. 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.
4. Go here and identify your Senators. Again, we hope that they make it easy to find their contact information.
5. 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.
6. Use your word processor to write an essay explaining your position. Be verbose. Copy this into each of the three letters you prepared above.
7. 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):

1. What problem would new OMB policies solve?
2. How well would they solve the problem?
3. What new problems would they add?
4. What are the economic and social costs?
5. Given the above, is it worth the cost?

Re:And people complaim about corporate welfare...

[reaper20]

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.

Whatever happened to competitive bidding?

[ortholattice]

All governments purchases are normally supposed to be open for competitive bidding. The bid will list a set of features required for an item being purchased, and the low bidder providing a product with those features wins the bid.

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.