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Texas Bill Would Require Open Source Consideration
Skapare writes "The Texas Legislature now has before it a bill ( ASCII text here, PDF here), submitted by State Senator John Carona, to require the state to consider open source and open standards as part of the acquisition of software. Texas, like many other states, has a budget crisis going on. If this passes, I believe it could help the state save a lot of money. Texans need to make sure their state representatives and senators know they want this to pass."
Many other countries seem to have similar considerations on a nation-by-nation basis, whereas the USA, if it even considers the question, does so on a state-be state basis. It's probably the state-by-state basis that will effect any actual change. This, not even on its own merits, but upon financial merits.
[slightly OT] I wonder how US and State Gov't entities reconcile themselves with their own laws and decrees WRT OS-level stong encryption in such a scenario?
C|N>K
No, there are no rules against selecting open source solutions. Open source has always been an option, and the "best value" business is typical of government contract requirements. Maybe there's a few evaluators that never "considered" open source; maybe they'll even do more than "consider" it for five minutes after this bill is passed. But it's unlikely to actually change anything.
All of which is why the bill is nothing more than a bit of grandstanding on the part of the sponsors. They can get a vocal geek lobby cheerleading for them.
Consider, for example, the well-known DoD "mandate" for Ada in all future projects. A few major projects were done in Ada. Most simply escaped under the "waiver" clause that let you simply claim it would be more cost-effective to use another language. And the everything-in-Ada requirement was a lot more stringent than this one. You see the same language there -- total cost of project, cost of components, cost of training, availability of personnel, blah, blah, blah.
I'm the network manager for a medium-size city government in Texas. Although city govts are distinct and separate from the state, we can still buy our software off of the "state contract" prices from "QISV" vendors without having to go thru the RFP/open bidding process.
Half a decade ago we embarked on acquiring only "vendor-supported turnkey software apps" and ditched our in-house written systems (mostly old mainframe stuff) because it was perceived to be more cost-saving route, rather than having to keep our own expensive tech staff on payroll. What we've actually learned over the years is that "vendor-supported turnkey apps" is a farce. The vendors corrall and herd you into a corner where they want you, the support prices skyrocket overnight while the quality of tech support plummets. They force you onto a never-ending upgrade gravy-train which only benefits their bottom line. They do not keep knowledgeable support staff because that is a cost center to them, you get to wait on hold forever only to get to talk to a bubblegum-smacking teenager with a condescending attitude who barely can parrot back the owner's manual to you and cannot solve any real technical problems.
In the end, running complex computer systems costs a lot of money, whether you pay thru the nose for "vendor supported turnkey apps" or keep your own staff of technical experts it eventually costs the same in the long run. When you do the latter, you are in much more control of your own destiny, you upgrade if-and-when you decide, not when the vendor decides. You can customize the system to fit your own internal business needs.
I am using open source software everywhere I possibly can in my organization. We're feeling the budget crunch too, and the purchase cost savings of open source is definitely popular with my managers, though they are concerned with "who will support it", well the answer is the same people who would be supporting the "vendor-supported turnkey apps" --- the city's own I.S. staff, because whoever the commercial software's "owner-of-the-day" (the companies are constantly getting bought out by other companies) is generally incompetant anymore.
the legislature meets for a 120 day period once every two years, not for one day every other year. The governor can also call a special session for 30 days anytime he wants IIRC.
As an I.T. guy/admin for a Texas agency this isn't going to happen. First of all, at least 75% of the tech staff at your average state agency isn't going to be able to learn to support open source software. It's not like in the real world where a good number of people in I.T. are interested in learning new things. Where I work there are techs that are possibly going to retire simply because we're going from Win 9x to 2k. Now if that throws them that much what do you think is going to happen when you put a Linux/BSD box in front of them? Also, it's painfully obvious that the people that run these agencies could care less about saving money. For example, we paied $300 to have a cpu fan replaced in a computer the other day because if we went out and bought one ourselves and installed it we'd be in violation of a contract with the harware repair vender. I deal with things like this every day and there's nothing that can be done about it.
Keep Austin Weird!
I'm lead engineer for a U.S. Air Force developmental and contracting facility. (I think it qualifies as "government".) I get to install damn near whatever I want in the lab. Most of my demonstrations become production prototypes, and come deployment time the execution contractors often choose the same architecture we prototyped, right down to the same open-source suites (operating environments, toolsets, tons of GNU stuff...).
The employees are generally responsible for vendor management and designing the criteria for the RFP/RFQ (though often they are even more removed from that and do vendor management for the vendors that design the criteria...).
Yes, we have vendor minders in the contracting center, but even they are beginning to open up to OS (since, for instance, some of the distros have received some US DoD "blessing"). And yes, sometimes it's "Here's a bunch of money, please tell us what we need and then build it for us," but we geeks in the process have our say and it often weighs in highly with the suits. Hell, that's literally 50% of my job--engineering assessment of contractor proposals for requirements, architecture, analysis, design, testing, coding, deployment and integration--half technical analyst for the customer, half mad scientist. It's a living.
If any given governmental entity has geeks on-staff, and they listen to the geeks at all, open-source can viably be a part of their IT infrastructure. If the governmental entity doesn't have its own technical experts, or has them but doesn't listen to them, they (A) deserve to suck, and (B) can still benefit from "consider OS" laws if they are encouraged (by said laws) to contract with someone clueful.
Anyway I'm not sure what you are arguing here. You seem to have a pretty good handle, you can't imagine the kinds of regulations that might block open source.
I don't have to imagine, I've lived it, and we're slowly making progress within my little slice of government IT to work our way around and through and over the maze. A law like this helps, because it gives the embattled geek who wants to see the right thing done one more small pile of paper to stack up against the other piles of paper. After all, that's how these types of decisions are made, right? Whichever side can produce the greater weight of relevant laws, regulations, instructions, and supporting documentation wins.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
In fact.. Since the Texas Govt. is broke they are cutting back on all expenses. They even wrote the Governor's website using opensource software... and SURPRISE Its been *very* successful!! Have a look at Governor Rick Perry's Website which is running the Zope application server with the Plone Content Management System