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New York City Examines Law Mandating Open Source
An anonymous submitter writes "The New York Council held a hearing on the 'SOFTWARE WARS.' The Select Committee on Technology in Government, chaired by Council Member Gale A. Brewer (D-Manhattan), held a public hearing Tuesday on software procurement practices by state and local governments. Representatives from the City's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, Microsoft, as well as numerous local software companies testified. Newsforge is carrying the testimony at the hearing of Tony Stanco, Director of The Center of Open Source & Government." Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
I think this has more to do with mandatory consideration than it does with mandatory use. Isn't similar legislation in process in California as well?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I happen to work for NYC government, and this post makes me want to cry.
Something people need to understand - city/federal government isn't anything similar to amazon or google. They can save money using open source - but we're the government - we're not running a search engine here, or selling books on the web. Most of what any city government IT department does is desktop support for people who use computers to do their jobs, usually entering some kind of information into one database or another.
Something else to keep in mind - we're not exactly paying the big bucks on salary either, especially for NYC. The kind of people who use these computers are very frequently people on a welfare assistance program that requires you to work to get your welfare check. Most of the time, these are some pretty great people, but they didn't exactly grow up with a computer in the house... ease of use is a big issue, and I think that it's still safe to say that crown belongs to Microsoft.
The only other big thing is communication. E-mail and the like. We use Groupwise in my agency, which is much lower cost than exchange, since Novell cuts us some pretty good deals on state contract. But we need to communicate to other people - the central IT agency for the city currently mandates that we maintain an exchange gateway, since there is no anti-virus product I can find that can scan attachments in groupwise. Even if that wasn't an issue, these are fairly important political figures, and so they demand blackberries - Mayor Bloomberg is *huge* on these things, and insists that people have them, and be able to respond to any e-mail within 10 minutes. If you can tell me how to get the BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server) running on Linux, I'll give you a great big cookie. There's countless things like this.
And back to those databases? Honestly, many of them still pop open a DOS window, for crying out loud. Even more require a *terminal emulator* to connect to an IBM mainframe. I think it's safe to say that we've been keeping the software budget on the cheap. Our standard workstation runs Windows 98, with Office 97. And keep in mind, they *come with the PC's*... so we're not exactly hosing money around here.
Sorry. A little bitterness slipped through there. =)
I'll sum up. Open source is good, and we use it when we can. We have a few Linux servers in production, and have used it for DNS, DHCP, Jabber, and firewalling. But mandating open source is just a *bad* thing.
Funny trivia:
City's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications
That's right. They're called DoITT. Pronounced (seriously here) "Do it."
Which, when they send memos mandating something, that's really all they say. Not really why, but just do it!
Though, they are usually right, believe it or not.
They don't want to mandate open source software, they want to mandate *consideration* of open source software.
Reports would have to have a line in them saying '...we didn't use open source software because...'
Everyone who has posted saying 'mandating open source software is bad', or 'open source software is about choice' should get a clue.
Actually, from what I understand, with only a few exceptions (such as government supported monopolies like utilities and national security interests), it is illegal for the US Government to fund projects that directly compete with commercial interests.
If they want to make a law, it should say that Open Source has to be considered.
Congratulations! You guessed it; that's what this law would do. No, it would not *require* open source; that would be ridiculous.
By now the MS Office file formats have been mostly reverse engineered and there is documentation available on the web about them. OpenOffice can read them, as can AbiWord.
Nothing reads MS formats reliably enough. Every alternative products says they do, but every time I get down to the details of the issue, it turns out they do, BUT,
* only simply formatted documents
* many features aren't supported
* there's degradation on every conversion, so you can't pass the documents back and forth too often
In the end, my users would have to manually reformat the documents, even if only to a small degree, almost every time. They don't have the time or patience.
As AbiWord's and wvWare's maintainer (and author of the DOC, RTF, and OpenWriter support in Abi), I'd just like to point out a few things in the parent post:
n s/wp/impexp/OpenWriter/xp/
...) and an XML parser. There are a plethora of both on the market for every flavour of OS and language you can imagine.
AbiWord can read and write the OpenOffice format to a large degree. I direct you to: http://www.abisource.com/lxr/source/abiword-plugi
From experience, handling DOC and OpenOffice/OASIS SXW format aren't even comparable. SXW's format is much more intelligible to us humans and its documentation is much more complete and accurate than the DOC documentation.
In order to read/write DOC, you need specialized OLE2 libraries (libole2, libgsf, POI) and a deep knowledge of DOC and how it applies binary SPRM diffs to create the master document. There are no user-friendly or command-line type tools to create OLE2 files. OSS language bindings to OLE2 parsers are non-existant. A generic "MSWord file format" parsing/generation tool simply does not exist. SXW's XML format at least helps in this regard.
In order to read/write a SXW file, you need a Zip implementation (winzip, zip, libgsf, pkzip,
The end result? It's near-trivial to write a script to generate a SXW file as the output of a report, and say, serve it up on the web. It's near impossible to do the same with DOC, unless you're using a COM interface into Word on Win32.
The problem with the documentation on DOC is that MSFT pulled its documentation from MSDN and other sites, and is unlikely to ever release newer versions. The last oficially documented format was Word 97 (8), while we're at something like Word 11 now. Fortunately, the formats are similar enough for us to get by. OpenOffice's documentation, however, will always be available from openoffice.org. This is quite significant.
Granted, DOC is ubiquituous in the marketplace today, and we software vendors should do our best to inter-operate with all of the MS Wordies out there. I'd give it a few years, though - SXW is a very new format, and it's only natural that it take a bit of time for it to be widely adopted. But it is being adopted by GnomeOffice and KOffice, amongst others. I bet that you'll be seeing a lot more SXW files floating around the 'net. And this is a *very* good thing.
Dom