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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."
BBC News reports that IBM has signed a major contract to provide GNU/Linux OS computers to Germany's Interior Ministry, which oversees law enforcement ( IBM signs Linux deal with Germany ). A Microsoft spokeswoman was disconcerted by the news, nonsensically stating that, "Any policy that favours one thing over another isn't helpful." Slashdot ( Germany, IBM Sign Major Linux Deal ).
Kuro5hin has a good story on a new report from Taiwan's official news agency that the goverment is pushing a Software Libre program ( Taiwan to start national plan to push free software ). Not only will the program include software development, but also extensive training and education. Most interesting is that the "national education system will switch to Open Source in order to provide a diverse IT education environment and ensure the people's rights to freedom of information." See also, Slashdot ( Taiwan to Start National Push For Free Software ).
Might Taiwan's initiative be related to a ZDNet News report on some of the difficulties Microsoft's licensing practices are creating in Taiwan ( Taiwan: MS may have violated trade laws )? This issue was discussed in depth on Kuro5hin ( Backlash against Microsoft intensifies in Taiwan; MS investigated for price gouging ).
Governments outside the U.S. are increasingly coming to the realization that it makes little sense to send their taxpayer dollars to Redmond, WA, USA as part of a "Microsoft Tax." Use of open source software not only saves the government money, but also helps to develop an indigenous IT industry.
Will the U.S. government realize the benefits of openness as well? Jamie Love, of the Consumer Project on Technology hopes so. He and Ralph Nader have sent a letter to the Office of Management and Budget encouraging the consideration of various policies that, through software procurement, will address quesions of Microsoft's monopoly as well as other issues ( Procurement policy and competition and security in software markets ). While the letter doesn't specifically recommend the adoption of open source software, it clearly a major aspect to consider.
Below are some of the practices Nader and Love want OMB to examine:
Ralph Nader said "The federal government spends billions of dollars on software purchases from one company that is continually raising prices, making its products incompatible with previous versions in order to force upgrades, deliberately creating interoperability problems with would-be competitors, and is well known for engaging in many other anticompetitive practices. Would a business that was spending this much money be such a passive consumer? "
James Love said "The US Government could easily solve all of its concerns over the Microsoft's anticompetitive conduct by being a smarter consumer. Taxpayers are spending millions to restrain Microsoft's monopoly, and billions to support the Microsoft monopoly. There needs to be a more coherent strategy."
Copyright (c) 2002 by the Information Society Project. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/). Minor typographical corrections made.
this kind of thing is what MS fears most: one of the world's largest "customers" jumping into the GPL'd software ring. that would not only give alternatives an enormous confidence boost in the eyes of other businesses, but it would start a massive trickle down effect, as all the companies that the government does business with now need to be "compliant" with something not of Redmond.
this is why MS seems to be fighting gpl anything in the US Government tooth and nail. with bsd-style lincenses microsoft could just take the code for little or no effort, and continue to ride on their reputation (nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft), but GPL locks them out nice and tight.
We've been seeing more stories about Governments either being petitioned to change their software buying policies, or mandate certain buying policies for their various departments.
The problem is that the mandates seem somewhat disconnected by technical reality and what software works best in a situation. My suggestion is that perhaps what should be mandated is a minimum standard of interoperability between systems, and a minimum level of openness about the mechanics through which the software achieves the interoperability.
So for example, the US gov't could specify that any productivity suite purchased by it's departments must support completely an open standard file format of their choosing or design. If MS Office chooses to support that file format properly, that there is no cap on how many units of MS Office could be purchased. If they choose not to, then it cannot be considered.
If that policy were applied to many different software application areas then it would quickly matter less where the software came from, and would start to matter more how good the software was.
What is the point here? I got koffice installed by default, and then I have star office somewhere, and then there is open office, and abiword, etc. There are plenty of office products, for free, that the government could use and not pay a dime for. I don't think I want to use my tax dollars for microsoft office, and I don't think anyone else does either.
If we have to though, because they don't want to spend millions of dollars on retraining a work force on how to use one version of office over another, I do believe that the government has the right to ask for the source code. HOw else would they know their vulnerabilities with e-mails like "I love you" and "Wanna see this horse go at it with a squirrel" causing billions of dollars in computer damage, not to hardware in general, but in software and peace of mind.
Which would you decide?
U.S. Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels opens the letter, replies with a very wordy letter whose 'jist' is "We'll look into it", and puts the file in the "review" basket (aka the trash can).
Welcome to America, where your letter is viewed, but dismissed unless you have a large audience of constituents backing you. This is how democracy works, for something to happen, a large group must support it.
OMB should also consider if dominant office productivity tools, including word processing, spreadsheets and presentation graphics, should be required to provide high quality ports to other operating systems, including platforms such as Linux or the BeOS.
First of all I do not miss MS Office. I think it is a better solution (legally and financially) to make MS not port its code (If the govt can tell them to do that, then they may as well just control them all together) but instead to open up it's office formats. Open Office is fine. I use it all the time and in some ways its better than MS Office (especially it's handling of corupted files). Anyway, the linux port idea I can understand because we all know linux is the big buzzword now but Beos? Haha... thats hilarious. First of all the develeopment of the OS doesn't exist anymore (yes the OS technically exist but its not going to get any better). Maybe they can force Microsoft to write some drivers so that Beos is usable and then port MS Office to it.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
OMB is asked to examine whether Microsoft source code should be provided to the general public; OMB also requests that the days be made longer, that marijuana should be legalized, that there should be world peace, and that the Supreme Court should have made him president instead.
Please file this additional document under "D" for Delusional.
Some good points are raised here. Documentation on file formats should be a required aspect of any product, simply because one of the challenges faced with computers is evolving your old data to new systems over time.
I don't agree that the government should be in the role of creating software. Government is not a good entity to choose technologies the free market should adopt. As far as software purchasing costs, you could make a strong argument for companies to provide reduced rates to government entities. But one should also appreciate that the tax dollars outlayed on software is more than made up by the tax revenues coming in as a result of the employment opportunties the software companies generate.
I think the true "key to the kingdom" is in the file formats. People are scared to break away from MS file formats more than anything, they are a powerful force in keeping MS in a dominate position.
If the formats where standardized (in lets say XML) it would greatly reduce EVERYONES dependacy on MS.
The government has an even greater reason to fear MS file formats. That reason is REALLY OLD DATA. The government needs to be able to work with extremely old file formats, and if that file format is not standard and has simply been "retired" by a company (MS) they are shit out of luck, and will end up making another company you rich for converting those "Word 2000" docs to "BobbySoft QuickEdit 2035".
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.
"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.
Um... okay, but is it really the perogative of the OMB to "use its power" that way? According to the OMB's own site, it "evaluates the effectiveness of agency programs, policies, and procedures, assesses competing funding demands among agencies, and sets funding priorities." In other words, it's an executive agency designed to ensure that the US taxpayers get the most bang for their buck, efficiency-wise, not to make political statements about reforming corporate behavior. That said,
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,
... this is still a good idea. Seems like the OMB would be entirely interested in making sure that computers and software bought with fed dollars aren't going to be easily hacked.
and to consider a number of strategies to use the US government's purchasing power to promote competition and make Microsoft behave;
But this, no no no. This is still a judicial matter, and any penalty against MS is going to be determined in court. An executive agency would be way overstepping its bounds here.
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
Yargh! But THIS is another good idea. Again, it's in the financial interest of the country to make sure we're not "locked in" to certain contractors who could then baloon their prices. Not that that ever happens...
So basically, I think there are some good ideas here with regard to protecting the federal government's investment in software and making sure they're not going down any paths simply because MS wants them to, but trying to wreck the monopoly just isn't in the charter of the OMB. Sorry.
And I consider the purchase of a buggy, insecure, bloated Operating System like Windows a waste of my money. When some Government clerk is just typing up documents on a PC, why do they need a copy of Windows (and presumably Office) when Linux and KOffice or OpenOffice, etc, will do the exact same thing at a fraction of the cost?
I'd much prefer if the government used free, open source operating systems as much as possible, saving taxpayer money and eventually getting me another tax cut (because 4 months is too long to work just to pay your taxes).
Cause it's our damn money, after all.
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?
The big goal isn't the government using good software, it's hurting MS.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
and I want a 40 billion dollars in the bank :)
I stole this Sig
...so, in a nutshell, Nader is saying that the government should make an effort to influence the marketplace in a certain direction, rather than letting natural market forces dictate what heppens (questionable/illegal business practices being part of the market).
I'd love to see the rise of Open Source, the fall of Microsoft, etc, as much as the next guy. But I don't want the government using my tax dollars to achieve that (except in antitrust and other legal manners).
The government should research carefully and buy what makes sense. However, no matter how much we all like Microsoft alternatives, in things like office suites, it's disengenuous to argue that there's a viable non-microsoft solution for what amounts to a company of over a million employees. What kinds of deployment and management tools do open source software suites have? How many IT workers are trained to install/troubleshoot them?
Governments in general, and the US government in particular, can just *barely* do their job as is. Asking them to take a leadership role in IT purchasing is like asking Microsoft to take a leadership role in corporate ethics. It ain't going to happen, and the attempt would be an expensive, error-infested waste of time and money for everyone involved.
My opinion is that open source will prevail in the long run -- but I'd rather wait 10 years longer if it meant not setting the precedent of government setting this kind of precedent.
Cheers
-b
How would you actually enforce that? I can see a few potential problems:
1. Unless the specification for these standard file formats is very precise, there will always be interoperability problems.
2. Even if the office software "supports" a standard format, it obviously isn't going to default to that format, so you'll have to deal with the training issues (always use "save as...").
3. Microsoft (or any other commercial vendor) would claim that they need to be able to modify or extend the "standard" format in order to be able to innovate new features. This is actually a valid complaint, and difficult to work around. If you allow proprietary extensions to a standard format, it's no longer truly standard.
I still think this is a good idea, I just suspect that it'd be a whole lot of work to define these standard formats such that they meet the needs of the government and also those of the software vendors.
-Mark
Why not also include the cost of re-training for each release of Win$hit, forced hardware upgrades, forced office suite upgrades, down-time due to crashes, lost data (where do you want your files to go today), viruses, macro-viruses, trojans, version incompatabilities, etc?
Claiming Windows has a lower TCO has always been a load of horse manure, anyway. It's all about whichever system you learned first.
So - back to the main topic - at least this might get more people thinking along the same lines. Remember what PT Barnum said - the only thing worse than bad publicity is no publicity. Publicity from Nader, et. al. - well, it could be worse.
"Double bonus: maybe the gov't will listen to him and switch to Linux?!?"
I'm all supportive of efforts to make Linux more mainstream, however the reason that it's not has nothing to do with MS being evil. Despite popular belief, Windows (particularly 2000) does what it needs to, and it has awesome software support to boot. Is it a security risk? Yes. Is it a problem to support? Yes. Would Linux kick it's but given a chance? Perhaps.
There is a fear of Linux out there. It can be a pain in the but to get working when you have no idea how it works. The Gov't or any big company is going to require that Linux is as easy to get running as Windows. Let's define 'easy' before the flames start rolling in: If a normal user running Linux cannot trade Word Documents back and forth between Windows user, it's not easy to use. See my point?
I'm not bashing Linux here, nor am I pro Microsoft, I'm saying that what is inhibiting it from being more mainstream is that the mainstream is already defined, and it'll have to play nicely with it.
"Derp de derp."
because the data is only accessible by the $4 billion IRS system, which was DOA. Check back later when the system is back up.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
People, and societies, are slow to defend themselves from abusiveness. Now it finally looks like there will be some effective defense.
I'm very happy with the letter to the OMB. It seems that it will help everyone begin thinking reasonably.
People are saying good things about Open Office. Version 1.0 was just released. Remember that the history of the source code is that it has already been through 4 or 5 major releases.
The lack of a good Office Suite has been a barrier to moving away from Micro$oft Turd ^H^H^H^H^H^H Word.
Governments have a duty not to use proprietary file formats. Governments have a duty not to allow themselves to be locked into an abusive company's money-making schemes.
MICROSOFTS BUSINESS STRATEGY HAS BEEN DECLARED ILLEGAL IN A COURT OF LAW!!!!! Any remedy imposed by the court had damned well better force a change of those practices! Why is it so hard for people to get their heads around this very simple concept?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
...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.
We're going to save money buy reducing (even purposely limiting) standardization and making the systems more complicated?
The basic idea of the Federal Gov't wringing tax dollar saving behavior out of proprietary software vendors is good. Free, open source software seems like a great solution for gov't. But these particular changes would only dramatically increase costs; you've got to standardize on something, whether it's Linux, Windows or whatever.
Slashdot is at its best as an interactive forum, not a PR platform for politicians.
Perhaps if Mr. Love and Mr. Nader posted their ideas on Slashdot *before* they wrote to OMB, they and we would have benefitted from the discussion. Now it looks like fishing for compliments, or more likely, a good old fashioned Press Release (well targeted).
Uhm, Ralph Nader has a bit more street cred in Washington than you.
Jason.
I have to agree with you (to an extent). Nader has a long history of pushing legislation through government to protect the public from itself.
A perfect example of this is the mandatory airbags in all cars sold in the US. On average, an airbag adds ~$800 the cost of a new car. The consumer doesn't get to choose if he/she wants this safety device -- and especially in this case, it isn't proven to save lives. Not only an example of a failed piece of legislature that won't ever go away, but another choice taken away from the consumer -- another opporitunity to market safety those with an extra $800 wasted. Now we all have to pay for the pyrotechnic devices to sit in front of our faces. Gee, thanks for pushing that legislature through, dick.
Now, to bring this back out to the greater political arena. Typically, Nader is anti-corporation and anti-capitalism. I find it hard to believe that a (generally) Libertarian community like Slashdot would sell-out free-thinking ideals for a little bit of Microsoft bashing from a guy like Nader who is not only anti-corporation, but anti-consumer-freedom (even though he claims to be a consumer advocate) -- and he is also pro-big-government taboot (which, by and large, Slashdot does not seem to be). This Microsoft-limiting is a similar tactic -- rather than let the courts handle Microsoft's antitrust problems -- he wants to administratively force the issue, bypassing our way of doing things...again contrary to Capitalist (and/or Libertarian) ideals.
Practically speaking, there are many ups and downs to having the US government's IT systems be completely heterogenous...and I'm not going into them, because my point is that no matter how much you like Nader and the Green Party that he represented -- there is no escaping his politics. He is for more government regulation than you can shake a stick at, the regulation spanning into everything we do -- no thanks Ralph.
Why can't people like Nader just look out for themselves, and leave me to take care of myself?
-Turkey
-Turkey
Let's see: the US government is supposed to be of the people, by the people, for the people. Nader is a Consumer Advocate, and since our society is extremely bent towards Capitalist ideals, that effectively makes him an advocate for the people (you knnow, the people whos money the government is spending). That he is asking the government to put some consideration into how they are spending MY money, in the hopes that the government's considerations on the matter will benefit ALL consumers of software products, I don't see how this is even slightly incongruous with Nader's stated mission.
And of course he's looking for publicity. It's very difficult to accomplish anyhting significant in this society without having publicity.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
The GPL in no way locks Microsoft out. They could gather up the source code and ship MSLinux tomorrow if they were so inclined. They could even mix in some of their own software to preserve their Monopoly, similar to what Apple's OSX has done with Darwin and BSD.
Of course, don't expect to see it done any time soon. They have a lot of money invested in their current windows architecture. They also have a long history of forking or restarting projects and standards such that they don't have to be accountable or compatable with other people.
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.
I would say that Nader has a large enough constituency, and has proven himself capable of making enough noise, that his letters are not summarily round-filed.
Just a guess, but I don't think any government official is eager to be portrayed as being wasteful of taxpayers money. Particularly not Republicans, since that is the main way in which they differentiate themselves from the Democrats.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You are defending the monoculture of one company providing a single, one-size-fits-all product for everyone. A product that they change whenever they want to, by the way. A monoculture of supplier.
What's wrong with a monoculture of well-defined standards instead? You can use any word processor you want, as long as it saves documents in "THIS" well-defined file format. Ditto for spreadsheets, presentations, address books, web browsers, web servers, etc. It's still reliable, compatible, and interoperable -- perhaps more so than that which is proposed by the single supplier who occasionally decides to redefine what they provide. Call it a monoculture of data, if you will.
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.
Exactly when did the gov't switch to Word; I thought they used Wordperfect for everything...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It is not all obvious to me that forcing the US Government to buy from multiple software vendors in order to "level" the economy in any way is a "good use" of its purchasing power. The (bad) premise in the headline is that a communist/egalitarian society/economic system is better than the current mixed-bag of capitalism and socialism.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Patriot© OS. Killed seven terrorists since lunch! All files in BushFS have permissions for user, group, world, and fbi. World is always off and fbi is always on! Buy today and get a free barrel of Oil© from Halliburton signed by Dick Cheney!
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
If Nader declares "Americans should never dress up like Carmen Miranda in public", you'd start seeing fruit salads over every Republican's head.
Geez, man. It has an integrated drawing application. The spreadsheet has a flight simulator. Can't do anything productive you say. Feh!
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
"Keep putting money into the economy?"
Hmm, so in fact you are advocating more government intervention into the economy? That seems like corporate welfare to me - while using OSS software would let more monies go to were it's really needed, like social services, paying off the debt, etc. I'm puzzled: are you for government saving money, or for public funding of Microsoft?(Well, perhaps you are, if you are one of their employees...)
And as for the costs of migration...Sure, there would need to be some minimal training in order to switch to Linux, altough new distros with KDE 3.0 or the soon-to-be-released Gnome 2.0 are very Windows-friendly and quite easy to use. Linux is now like a sports car: easy to drive, but more difficult/delicate to tweak/upgrade if you're not an admin (then again, users in a corporate/govt. setting should not be tweaking or upgrading their installations, so that point is moot). Definitely, some of the money saved would have to be spent on support engineers. However, these would probably cost less than what would be saved from ditching the combined Microsoft licenses, and the money spent would actually go in salaries instead of increasing MS's enormous cash pile - which, from an economic point of view, doesn't really count as "putting money in the economy". In fact, giving money to MS is putting money out of the economy, since right now it is not being spent but rather hoarded.
Reminder: find a new sig
I personally think Nader is a dufus-without-a-cause...
But I must admit that I agree with all of his recommendations. The government is throwing money out the window by renting licenses, be it from MS, Word Perfect, or whatever.
FWIW, most of the government use of computers CAN be done very well under Linux or any other *nix OS. We're talking mostly about data entry, data queries, etc. by staff around the country handling local offices. I would suspect that MOST employees of the federal government don't (or shouldn't) need to compose documents in a word processor. Some management-type, yes, but the bulk of the federal government that uses computers, I think, are employees handing out unemployment checks, Census people doing data entry, INS agents pulling up records of people as they enter the country, etc.
All of these tasks are VERY well-handled by a system such as Unix. Doesn't even require a GUI and, in many cases, a GUI would slow things down.
I think the main idea would be to avoid paying Windows licenses as much as possible. My guess is that the vast majority of government computers just don't need Windows, period.
Using procurement in this fashion is an interesting tactic. How does OMB account for GPL "purchases"?
FWIW, in my job at a government science installation:
1. The Official Agency Word Processor is Word Perfect.
2. Much of my info is stored in Oracle Databases.
3. Everyone has Windows and Office, much of that is to read documents that others (the Public) send us. Yes, I know OpenOffice could do that. That's what I'm using.
4. For our computations, we take data from public formats (cdf), process it with legacy Fortran, and run computations on a variety of *nix, inluding Suns, and increasingly, *many* Linux boxen.
5. email is netscape.
The point being, these installations end up running, like many good companies, on a combination of legacies, IT whims, and user needs.
Execept, of course, when the next "trend from the top" comes down and, like such trends in private companies, set directives that trump the local users' needs and create another layer of mess. And this helps us, or open source, how?
This kind of stuff should be pursued the same way that the Linux "community" has pressed businesses--- with informed, local IT managers pushing open source solutions, not from the top.
Are you kidding me? You do understand that Ralph Nader is the man who brought Detroit to their knees at the height of their influence and power don't you?
I would venture to say that his influence is enough to cause serious change.
Stop being so damned cynical and participate in the process. If you feel disenfranchised in America, it is most likely because you spend more time on /. bitching than acutally doing the hard things it takes to make real change.
If they were to do that, there would be no way that they could make the kind of profit on MSLinux or any gpled software that they do now.
As you said, their embrace and extend tactic would not work with GPLed software. Which is a great thing about GPL software.
Could you offer documentation, please?
How do projects like gv, Multivalent and xpdf (among others) manage?
DNA just wants to be free...
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
Governments *do* and *should* try to use their purchasing power for the public good, whenever it's practical. In many cases, there are several competing products in the same price range that would all do the job as well. So why not spend the money where it has the greatest number of positive side effects?
An example of this is the purchase of fleet vehicles- postal Jeeps, police cars, etc. Usually, by law, these must be American cars. This helps the American auto industry, provides jobs, generates wealth, more tax revenue, etc.
In other cases, such as with the defense industry, the money spent there subsidizes civilian aviation, providing jobs, etc., but also enabling commerce with more affordable passenger and cargo jets.
Similarly, spending money on OSS not only gives the government/taxpayers better value, it also enables commerce by spurring development of more OSS- which everyone can use, for free! This is an investment in our future, just like building highways. Furthermore, it provides more building blocks for even more OSS.
Keep this in mind: the reason Microsoft has been able to make so much money is that its products make other businesses more efficient, enabling so much more commerce. But imagine how much more wealth would be created if the money earmarked for Microsoft, however relatively little, could be spent generating more business instead. Look at a typical company's IT budget vs. its marketing budget, and you'll see what I mean.
I once ran across some slightly inebriated normal citizens who had gotten hold of a computer magazine.
They were doing "dramatic readings of this alphabet soup", as they explained it to me, accompanied by gales of laughter. Listening to them, I had to admit it was funny, but I don't think we were enjoying the same joke.
OMB probably thinks linux is an excel macro.
Nader is a Consumer Advocate, and since our society is extremely bent towards Capitalist ideals, that effectively makes him an advocate for the people (you knnow, the people whos money the government is spending).
Really? That's funny. I'm a consumer, and I don't recall asking for an advocate.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Nobody would ask McDonnell-Douglas to make their B2 bomber plans public.
Well, they could, but they wouldn't get vey far, since the B-2 Spirit is built by Northrop-Grumman, not Boeing/McDonnel-Douglas!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
This has to be the dumbest idea I ahve heard on /. in almost 72 hours, and there were many to pick from.
People want to be productive/efficient, even govt employees. Using open source software from a variety of vendors gets you as far away from that goal as you can get. Forcing the gov't to, on opurpose, make people inefficient is a huge waste of tax dollars.
People choose to MS Office because it is superior to any, and I mean any, other comparable software on the market.
Ralph Nader is unsafe at any speed.
I'm still working on a clever footer.
I'm sure there were plenty of African Americans that didn't ask for Martin Luther King to advocate for them. That doesn't mean they didn't need it or benefit from it, just that they weren't conscious enough to recognize their need.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
For text-based files, require them to be XML, and that the Schemas be published.
For binary files, specs already have to be precise (whether the spec is published or not) for reliable operation. And as far as extension goes, mandate that any extensions to the file format be made using specific extension semantics imposed by the format itself (i.e., reserved bits w/ a standards body allocating those bits to registered extensions, mandated publication of the semantics of the extensions, etc).
You all should get out of your left wing biases for a second to realize that Nader isn't well respected in many circles. He is reviled as a Socialist nutcase by the Right and Libertarians at a minimum as a general rule consider him to be a clueless luddite (hmm isn't that being redundant?)
As much as you all don't want to hear it, Jerry Falwell would be taken more seriously by the current elected government if he proposed this. You need to send a messenger that will be respected by the recipient when dealing with politics. The best person actually to make the case for Linux is Robert Bork. He has come out against Microsoft (in support of the anti-trust case no less) and if he were to tell Bush that Star Office is better, Bush would probably listen.
Remember people, Bush and his people decide WHERE the money will be spent, Congress merely allocates it. If Bush wants to, he can tell the entire federal bureacracy to sign no new contracts and to not renew any contracts with companies like Microsoft and use only OpenOffice.
No, Ralph is not suggesting that the power of free enterprise and marketplace should be used instead of government edicts. He is saying the complete OPPOSITE. He is requesting that the US Government use its purchasing power to manipulate the marketplace by using artificial reasoning for selecting a product. The marketplace is doing the complete opposite of what Nader is requesting. If Nader really wanted what you suggested, he would shut up and not force his will upon the OMB decision making process. Its a bit different for Ralph Nader to tell the government to do something compared to you and I. He has power, we don't. The OMB couldn't give a damn about my opinion on what OS they should use even though I would kick Nader's ass up and down the street in OS and general computer knowledge as would most Slashdot readers.
This is just another attempt to slam Microsoft for not falling to the will of the far left politicos in this country as so many companies have.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
You must have good eyes because I rarely see it. The problem is that most of the moderation I have seen on valid posts are using moderation as a form of attack and demeaning to the poster. I have seen numerous times when profanity, attack and general nastiness being modded up when favorite whipping boys are the target (i.e., Microsoft).
Moderation has been poor (IMHO) on Slashdot ever since they updated Slashcode. Its either software or the users -- or both.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Was it in Carl Sagan's CONTACT that there is a Hadden Cybernetics product that is able to identify political speech that is confiscated by the government? Likewise, the government could confiscate from Microsoft the source code to Orifice...
I'm sure there were plenty of African Americans that didn't ask for Martin Luther King to advocate for them. That doesn't mean they didn't need it or benefit from it, just that they weren't conscious enough to recognize their need.
Wow. The degree of arrogance embodied by that statement is simply jaw-dropping.
I honestly don't know what to say (and you won't hear that from me very often, believe me). You win this one.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Ralph Nader already has his moment at the top of the world. His clout has long been exhausted and now he only sits on the top of the sun, melting away like Frosty the Snowman.
This is why 7000 people showed up in Tampa to hear him speak at Demoracy Rising? I didn't realise...
t'nera semordnilap
Your point is well taken, but let's not limit ourselves to PDF. It's great for distributing printed documents, but lousy for reading them online. If the intended product is a printed document, you can't beat PDF, but if it's meant to be read online, it ought to be HTML or whatever. Frankly, I like DocBook and XML (also open standards) as master formats, which allow easy processing into whatever final format is desired.
Not only do we need to wean government off proprietary file formats, we need to quit wasting so much paper!
Do you understand Capitalism? If the Government uses its purchasing power in an artificial manner, it is behaving in the same way as a Socialist/Communist government entity dictating a command economy. If the Government starts making purchasing decisions based on some artifical "societal ends" then the Government can start dictating behavior based on its economic power. That is not the purpose of a Constitutional Republic...that is the purpose of a controlled economy. 180 degrees opposite of the desires of our Founding Fathers.
You don't seem to like free enterprise solutions to problems and would rather have the government dictate solutions as laws and subsidies.
What? What are you thinking? I am requesting that a leftist, socialist be ignored because he wants the Government to avoid a free enterprise solution and artificially pick another product to hurt a specific manufacturer. That is not a free market solution. That is a socialist solution. The last thing that goes through Nader's head is anything that deals with a free market.
Your line of thinking scares me. You want Government to start making social agendas out of software using taxpayer dollars and call it capitalism. Doesn't make sense. The US Government's last job is making social agendas -- look it up in the Constitution.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
(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?
The Judge said, "You may have more money than me, but you don't have more power than me" and Bill said, "Yes" without seeming conceitful and then he started grovelling.
Because he handled himself properly, he won, it's not some DoJ or Bush conspiracy, everybody want stheir kudos and respect, same as you'd trust someone that talks nice in a $1000 suit over a shifty guy walking up to you at night in a dark alley in the projects.
They didn't let him off free, they broke him as a man. Bill Gates has a very short temper and you could see on his face that he was trying his best not to shout at the Judge, because he knew if he did he'd be found guilty. Bill Gates vs. DoJ and Bill Gates wins, but both parties are corrupt and nobody cares who's actually right, that's the tragedy.
A caveman dreams of being us, the incalculable power and riches. We dream of being Q, then what?
Are you actually saying that the government should look the other way when "questionable/illegal business" practices are "dictat[ing] what happens"?? And that these practices are part of the "natural market forces" that those of us who believe in the market economy revere?? Because that's what it sounds like.
Gotta go. The mafia just asked for more "protection money". Oh, well. Natural market forces.
Move on. There's nothing to see here.
Back in the mumblety-early 80s, when Unix was a trademark of Bell Labs and/or AT&T and/or Western Union and a commercial product, the Fedz put out an RFP for a big software project, which included the then-not-uncommon requirement (for custom software deals) that they get unlimited rights to all the software delivered - that meant not just access to the source, but the ability to do anything they want to with it, resell it, modify it, whatever. They didn't insist that they _had_ to buy that as part of the final deal, but it had to be offered and priced. The rumor is that we gave them a price, which reflected what we thought the future commercial value of Unix was - a cool $1B. They said thank you, checked the box on their form, and didn't buy it :-) (Too bad - I forget what the price that the rights to Unix finally sold for, but it was a lot less.... though by then we had *BSD and Linux available under various free-ish licenses.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I wonder what would have happened if he had one.
You, and the other eight of us would have thrown a party?
Of course, we knew this guy's position from the start. I can't see how anyone would be against such a proposal: capitalists thrive on competition, so the government pushing along competition would be a good thing*, anti-capitalist types dislike Microsoft and would like to see a reasonable alternative ($4000 for a powermac doesn't work for most). Boosting someone other than the only game in town, who has been possibly unscrupulous, and definitely been getting money and assistance from the Gov't, seems like a win for everyone.
* - Yes, I know government intervention doesn't jibe with capitalism. But, no capitalists I've met complain that the US government is doing it anyway, by giving money to Microsoft (and several other large companies), so promoting competition shouldn't bother them in this case. It's correcting an error.
Word 6 on Windows 3.1 was also completely unusable. It was huge, slow, and was the first Word to support Word Macro Viruses; that's about it.
In the meantime, Wordperfect for Windows looked like just another word processor on Windows to me, but I didn't get to use it much due to it's non-rampant success...
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And I quote:
Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment.
Jesus, how much time of yours does Slashdot have to waste to let you reply to a thread; that's pathetic. And when did they raise it from one minute, anyhow. Give 'em an inch, and they take a parsec.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]