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Open Source in Government
A reader writes: "There is a feature running on NF about a conference this October. More information can be found on the conference website." It's worth pointing that despite the fact that the conference is two days long, the organizers have asked for material submissions to be included in the conference handbook. So, if you've got some materials/thoughts, start polishing them up.
The more governments get involved the more I start to worry.
How long after Sadam Husain launches a major investment in OSS will it be before the US Govt. bans all its citizens form partisipating.
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
This is typical generic FUD you would hear from misinformed people. Some people have vaguely heard about this Linux thing and the clichés that go with it (albeit this slowly changing). This shows that main battle Linux is now facing is the Marketing one, as in technology it's on par and often better than the alternative.
I hope that with IBM/HPaq/Dell and so on entering the field this will slowly change
Who's going to bribe politicans to get the government to use OSS? The tone of these articles suggest that the government would use it because it is better. Perhaps the author is trying to be funny.
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...The idea of increasing the use of software, esp. OSS, to manage and automate governmental systems, is definitely a good idea. Why? When computers are doing the computation/delivery of information, transaction costs are reduced to zero. I'd say this would make for a more efficient and less bloated form of government, once the actual programming and configuration of said systems were completed. The only caveat is that the policies and procedures implemented in such programs would have to be scrutinized to ensure fairness and equality.*
That said, I don't think I've seen or heard of any open source application aimed at sectors of governmental operation... Any input on that subject?
*(I use the terms 'fairness' and 'equality' relatively loosely, so they can still be applied to the subject of national government.)
May the threads progress competently.
This seems like a natural first step, but it's almost impossible to discuss the possibility of using open source with real teachers in real US schools because most teachers are simply afraid of technology. You know, it's like oh the little gremlins in the box are controlled by some guy in the district office who is watching me and recording every move I make. Please, just leave me alone before they find out I was talking with you about this hacker stuff.
Even those who are supposed to be teaching technology will tell you that they have this huge investment in proprietary MS, educational titles so they have no choice but to stick with it. However, when you demonstrate that those same apps work under Wine they come up with this shuffle the feet thing that basically comes back to well I don't know about these important things that the district decides on and it's not really my business because the district has its policies.
Then when I push for details on how the district is in such control over the individual classrooms they come to the part that really kills me which is where they say they have to use MS because it allows them to access the net and any non MS servers on their network are forbidden by the district. Perhaps this is just a snowjob from a teacher who is giving me a bunch of shit, but this is what I was told.
At least school districts should encourage teachers to try and use open source rather than actively discouraging them with district policies set by Redmond. The situation we're in is insane and this is tax payers money. I don't see how the free market argument works in favor of closed source when we're dealing with tax dollars to begin with.
Oh, that's easy. "Business is bad. Microsoft is evil. George W. Bush is a dictator. Business is bad, bad, bad. Everything should be free. Free Tibet. Business is bad. Impeach Bush." Gimme a fucking break. How can people be so rational while they're writing code, and so random and stupid at all other times?
I hope you didn't just pull those boxes as suggested. He was obviously in the wrong. I hope you took the time to point out alternatives and clear up his misguided opinions.
Auditors don't run projects, you do. I work for a state governmemt. And a lot of our projectes are federally funded of course. But that doesn't mean the feds get to run the show. Open source is clearly in the public interest. And my projects are better for it. And the feds (my feds I guess) approve.
This type of situation demonstrates the lack of communication between business planning and IT. When you let your exec runs your IT decisions -- disaster! (Like the IBM commercial -- is this implementable? No.) Equally disasterous, when IT makes all the tech decisions without involving the execs. (You built what? Cool. But we don't sell those widgets anymore. You just wasted the last six months on something we phased out four months ago.) Hello. Time for a business model that lets your IT and your Business Planning talk about some fundamentals.
FUD runs both ways my friends. If you don't step up and correct some of it, the problem just gets worse.
I used to hear that sort of FUD all of the time. Mostly from people who had spent a great deal of time and money getting certified in some other vendor's software. Linux and Free Software are dangerous to these people because they seriously impact the value of these people's skills. If more and more businesses and organizations start using Free Software, then there will be less demand for their particular skillset.
Many of the points that the GAO guy brought up are simply not true, and all of them should be taken with a huge grain of salt. There haven't been any "massive security" issues with Linux (although the same can't be said for some other PC based server operating systems written in Redmond), and there haven't been any major reliability problems either. In fact, anecdotal evidence shows that Linux is more secure and more reliable than its commercial competitors. As for commercial support, I have been using Linux since 1994, and there has always been someone you could call for support (granted, they were probably fairly small). Nowadays you can contract support from IBM or HP, which should be support enough for just about anyone. And if he thinks that Free Software is "haphazard" he should see what passes for development in some closed source commercial companies. Borland's Interbase apparently has had a backdoor password for years that wasn't found until the source was opened, and some versions of Excell shipped with a full blown flight simulator included. You can put anything in a commercial software product without anyone being the wiser. The last point is especially weak. The GPL, arguably the most restrictive Free Software license, doesn't even attempt to control how you use the software. You don't have to pay one bit of attention to the GPL unless you distribute software based on GPLed source. Most commercial software EULA's on the other hand have all sorts of end user stipulations. In other words there are no "licensing issues" and you certainly wouldn't have to put your lab results into the public domain.
This particular brand of FUD hasn't worked particularly well against Linux because so many folks have used Linux successfully. Linux's low price also makes it easy to run your own tests. Linux has simply become too popular to ignore these days. There are simply too many happy Linux users to overlook the chance to get good software at a very low price.
The simple fact is that the US Government is the single largest "company" in the World. It has millions of employees, hundreds of thousands computers, and it purchases things from thousands of other companies.
It is this purchasing power that affects everyone. In the business world you try to lower the barriers of communication and collaboration with your main customers as much as possible. Often this means switching to applications that the customer users. They use EDI, so you use EDI; they accept bids on a website that requires Intnernet Explorer, you run a Windows machine to use Internet Explorer; they will only accept Word documents in response to Request for Proposals, you don't dare risk having something misformatted because you used OpenOffice and loose a million dollar bid.
Get the picture? If the government switches to Linux, OpenOffice, Apache, etc, and sends messages back to vendors that say, "I'm sorry, I couldn't open your attachment it was in a format my software doesn't understand," guess what? That vendor will change to fit what the goverment wants.
Now, Microsoft will say this is bad. It is bad...for Microsoft. It is bad for them because they will loose customers. It is not bad for capatalism, as they would try to say. Sure, it means that software companies like MS will not be as big as they have been in the past, they will cut jobs, they will have lower shareholder value, yada yada yada. But, this does not mean capitalism is hurt. It just means the money that was going to MS will now be going to other things.
Those other things might be other software companies, like Redhat, or others yet to be founded, or it might be that the money is spent to improve roads, cleanup toxic dumps, or build a high speed commuter rail. This doesn't make MS happy, but it makes taxpayers happy.
In fact, the government might not spend the money at all, instead, they might lower taxes. And the companies that save money by not buying MS will spend the money on capital improvements that enchance their business, or on the employees.
And when employees have more money in their pockets because of lower taxes and higher paychecks, they will spend it on cars, clothes, books, computers (which cost less because they don't have Windows on them), and other things.
This is why Microsoft fights tooth and nail to stop a goverment from switching. They did it in Mexico, they are doing it now in Peru and China.
Remember, Microsoft is a very good and successful company, but they are also a rich kid that hordes it's money. They do not stimulate the economy the way companies that spend do.
I'm working on a couple of projects they tell me will be open source (I haven't seen the license yet, but I expect it to be fine) for the EPA. There are some good reasons for making it open source:
- The same physics apply everywhere. I write one Gaussian plume atmospheric transport routine, and it works for anyone who wants to use it.
- People can review the work. Other models do the same thing, but the source code is not available. Meteorologists aren't going to reverse-engineer the code and figure out what's going on. They would rather be able to review it outright.
- It helps other organizations which have the same problems.
Granted, the particular code that processes data for the Regional Haze Rule isn't very helpful to anyone but the EPA, the Department of the Interior, and the states, but consider the utility of open source library software, call tracking software, document retrieval software, GIS applications, and more.There are a number of special purpose applications that governments have a particular need for, and there's no reason everyone should develop the software separately.
I hate call waitin`~+~~~
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