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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."
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.
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".
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.
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?
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.
Uh, the government is already influencing the marketplace in a major influence at that. Nader appears to be asking for the government to influencing it less or at least differently, as to not support a convicted criminal.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
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.
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.