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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
Just wondering, Typical questions.
1. If you want to use an opensource product, where do you learn about it? I know about oracle and mysql, but who do I goto for mysql paid support?
2. What about total solutions, other than RedHat or VA Software, are there other vedors? Or do I just goto IBM and Say "Linux"?
3. Are any opensource vendors bidding on government contracts?
4. Do the opensource vendors support 24/7 priority support? What about public safety? (fire/police/ambulance/etc.)
I deal with public safety, and they want a live person, with escalation if something is service impacting. They want service level agreements.
If I contact a large vendor, they have all those answers, they even seek my business. I have not seen much opensource support or opensource products besides apache and support utiltiies. I have not *seen* many adverts, people offering demos, people offering to fill a niche market, where are the opensource companies people need to turn too?
Ok, Linux, despite what M$ may claim, has a place in today's post-pets.com/IPO/stupid-investing economy. As such, it's not as visible anymore. Think of it this way: when cell phones first came out, you knew who had one. They were different, elitist. Now, hilljacks from BFE Arkansas have cell phones, and no one notices. Once a Product becomes a standard part of everyday life, it just blends into the background.
This conference wants to 'Raise Awareness' and such and such. I think that, for the most part, people are aware of Open-Source. There are few markets, such as the lucrative US gov't market, that have yet to fully embrace it, but that's only a matter of time.
As of today, there are quite a few open-source companies, who unfortunately compete against each other, more often than not. This, IMHO, is the only reason that OSS is not as widely used as of yet. Yes, blame M$. But, that's just marketing. Marketing does wonders, but it's not everything. What is needed to overtake their monopolistic standing is another strong (not as big perhaps, but strong), company, with a very stable business behind it.
When i first heard of United Linux, my thought was, "Finally." But, no, it's simply a loose conglomerate of some lesser distros. What is needed to finally grab hold of these markets that seem so out of reach, is a single entity. If I'm a businessman, and wish to use Linux, I ask, ok, show me linux. What happens? I'm asked, "What do you want? Suse, Lindows, Mandrake, Debian, United, RedHat, ect.?" This does not work. If a businessman were instead told, "Here is Gerf Linux, the best supported and used Linux distro out there. It's the de facto Linux for all users. And, it's parent company, Gerf Inc. is making money, and will be around to support it too." THAT my friends, is what would finally make Linux, or any software in general, look more appealing to a company/government/user/organization. So, who can do that, and how? Sadly, no one. Unless standards were set for every miniscule detail, this system is not going to prosper in the way we wish it to.
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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I live in a third world country, and our government is pushing towards creating standards for the the development of government software. One of the points is to require all software developed for any government instance to be Open Source, they are even considering to create a sourceforge-like repository to handle all the projects.
Why is this? well, I can see one obvious reason: all the local governments, central government instances, institutes, dependencies, etc have in one point of time developed software systems. One of the first dreams about the internet was to make all the government information available for the public, but in a disordered environment where everyone creates their own solution, using their own contractors, using their own tools and methos, you end up with a mess.
I have seen a LOT of goverment software made in tools like FoxPro, VB, Pascal, etc by people who just had little knowledge in the field (mostly just-graduated people who had a "contact" with somebody making the desicions). The issue is that if you make standards and force the solutions to be Open Source (so anybody can audit your code) you gain a lot.
I have always put the peruvian case as an example, the problem is that they got too much publicity and the big boys pushed back. Here everything is being done a lot quieter, but the end goal is almost the same.
I have grat hopes in this kind initiatives.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
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.
We work fairly closely with the state for alot of online stuff, (manage a state, county and local websites, state agencies, web apps, that kind of thing) and we're a big open source shop... we've had developers that have worked (in spite of our stupid IP-owning contracts) for open source projects such as FreeTDS. We use Apache, Perl, tomcat, mysql, Postgres, Linux. Yeah, we have some commercial stuff here too, Oracle, Informix, and some commercial dev libraries. On the whole, we use open source when we can... we're a pretty geeky shop and management doesn't care how the job gets done as long as it does get done, which makes for a pretty cool environment to work in, as we can play around with all sorts of different methods.
Having said that, pushing Open Source in government, (ANY government, at least here in the US) is very tricky... this is changing a bit as security is becoming a bit of a critical issue for many agencies, and the "don't ask, don't tell" policies of many commercial shops w/r/t security is starting to wear thin. However, for the large part, commercial vendors still run the show. Our states' information management services division is very much a buzzword-du-jour type shop, pimping the latest redmond-hyped technology, often to the detriment of the taxpayer (when a simple open source solution would suffice just as easily, and cost only labor...) Of course, finding someone who can run a few "Wizards" to cobble together some microsoft apps into a work system is alot easier than finding people clueful enough about open source to make it work really well...
Also another prevailing attitude is the good old "you get what you pay for" stance, although this varies from place to place... the reaction covers the scale from "We don't want no hippie-pinko crap on our network" to "You can save us how much????"
Hopefully as time goes on, the attitudes in government towards open source will shift further towards the positive, but I think that this could take quite a while. Just a few thoughts....
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Okay, fine. But what operating system hasn't had massive security issues?
This was '98. RedHat had huge security problems back then (installing most services by default and open etc).
2.2 was a very stable and reliable kernel, and since the 2.5 branch, I've been using the latest kernel on all of my high demand enterprise servers.
Linux still have problems in the highend with the VM issues. Which is why they're changing the VM again for 2.6 (or whatever).
Yes, but they are shallow bugs. Read RMS's article, the Cathedral in the Bizarre, located here [gnu.org] for more details.
Bugs are bugs. And I don't think the recent bugs in openssh, openssl, and apache were shallow.
Hahahahahahaahhaha. That's a good one. Maybe you haven't heard about the GPL, but under Linux's license you actually are required to release your experiments to the public. Try doing that in Windows!
No, you're not. Nowhere in the GPL does it says you have to release your experiments to the public. Please reread the GPL. Only when you distribute you're changes to the software, do you have to rerelease the changes to GPL. Also, GPL doesn't allow you to put your derivative works in the public domain. There are no problems putting derivative works (works linked against libraries in Windows) in the public domain.
And finally,
Wow, now that strikes me as a lot of FUD. Do you work for Microsoft?
Maybe you need to get off your high horse and reread his comment again? He said those comments were not his, but rather his auditor's comments.
Je ne parle pas francais.
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.