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Using Closed Standards To Pay For Open Ones
An anonymous reader points to a story at NewsForge, writing "EGOVOS analyzes the recently passed South African OSS plan and proposes a great way to fund Open Source education and development until companies comply with open standards. Microsoft pays a 10% penalty until their products comply with open standards. That would be billions of dollars to Open Source to compensate for an unlevel playing field until it is leveled. All the policy guidelines for governments are worth reading. This looks like a workable plan from a credible group." Reader johndiii clarifies: "From what I have been able to see, the strategy document is 'proposed,'
not 'recently passed,' and is not yet official policy of the South
African government."
Is that they don't have to give a crap about your desire for Open Standards. They want to force Microsoft to give them a 10% discount, or they'll refuse to buy the product. Well, too bad. Because of the monopoly, they probably already own some of the product, they probably have a requirement to work with other Windows systems, and all Microsoft has to say is "neener neener". They'll buy anyway, because the reason for buying Microsoft products is very simple: they have a monopoly.
It's a nice thought, but I don't think you can just give someone a level playing field, all anti-trust laws to the contrary. Ultimately, OSS has to stand on its own merits, or it's not a competitor, it's just an also-ran.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
This article makes for some interesting reading. Are they really after Open Source? Or is the MS version ("Shared Source") their aim?
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
From Hans Reiserâ(TM)s last answer:
... but there isn't enough money floating around to attract any genuinely bad folks into our industry.
;-)
âWe should all keep in mind though that there aren't any hard core greedy evil people in our industry. They are all basically good hearted people who chose trying to create a better society as their life's work at a substantial cost in personal income.
Not yet....;-)
With change accelerating we canâ(TM)t even have a âoenot yetâ last through the day. I dunno, that wink at the end seems a little more evil than I recall two hours ago...
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
The real question is how wo would end up on the commity which determines whether Microsoft is
"conforming" and how "bribable" they are.
A good strong law that says "the government shall not store any data in any format that is not *completely* accessible via an open standard, and shall be enjoined from purchasing or using products that do not directly and naturally favor the open and publically defined means of storage, unless no such open product does exist..." make sense.
Penalty taxes dont.
Microsoft and similar have rat-ba^H^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers and marketroids who *live* to be so constrained so that when they are ruled "compliant" by whatever means they are then validated that ".doc format is as open a standard as can be, see where this government body said so"
etc. od nausium, ahmen... 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Bill Gates becomes popular on Slashdot
;)
According to this googlefight, Bill Gates is more popular than Linus Torvalds on Slashdot.
My journal has hot
and your modded insightful?
This is meant to keep open standards within government. If a company doesn't comply, then they get charged and the money goes to support OSS. Now, the money issue aside, fines for not supporting standards is a good thing. Imagine if people decided to make their own rules for the road. It is hard for any good software to compete against software that is using non-compliant standards which lock the entire system into that non-compliant standard. One of the biggest and most important reasons that one piece of software doesn't replace another is the change. If all the data, employees, and other software all works well with the old system and it would take a lot of time and money to switch, then why do it? Closed source, proprietary code, and patents all have an effect of creating a monopoly that stifles competition and progress.
Question everything.
..the logic here is flawed.
My company is active in SA and I had a chance to talk with a colleague about the SA gov over dinner. From what I gathered, the government there is EXTREAMLY corrupt. The cash collected here probably wouldn't be going to fund open source projects, it would be going into politicians pockets.
While this might be a good model if properly implemented in a country not riddled with corruption, M$ would just write this off as the cost of doing business in South Africa without concerning itself with open standards comformance.
All your base are belong to us!
Many bad things could come from something like this.
1. An end to corporate involement with innovation.
2. Bad standards.
You have to remember, there are TONS of conflicting standards out there, plenty of standards bodies out there... WHo is going to set the standards for the standards bodies then?
Also, if people didn't break some standards and go off on a tangent, how would we get improvement?
I must be missing something here!
MS can well afford an extra 10% to be exempted from OSS purchasing requirements. They'll certainly never open their code for that, (they'll just charge it back to their customers, maybe after a year or two.)
They'd probably give SA an even bigger discount than 10% (they have before) if they were faced with a mandate or users switching to cheaper, better OSS solutions that they can't compete with.
Unless I majorly missed something, it looks like South Africa is trying to look good by mandating OSS and then quietly retracting so as not to hurt MS.
So the South African government believes in a neutral procurement policy wrt proprietary and open source software. Then why is it phasing in an open source software procurement policy over the long run? The government might as well just implement an open source procurement policy now. It would be a lot more honest.
.............. kris
"I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me."
The correct solution is to write the procurement to require that any and all software provide a complete specification of the data formats and the rules for display of data. Such a requirement seems reasonable in a governmental context where documents frequently have a lifetime longer than Word processing software. With the specs, future programmers would be able to decipher the important hieroglyphics even if the latest word processor won't.
If Microsoft software doesn't comply with the degree of openness you require, then simply don't buy Microsoft software.
That's all.
Buying Microsoft software and then assessing penalties against MS would be blatantly unfair.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
[Background - I use OSS myself - Linux, Apache, PHP, Quanta etc. both for leisure & work. My main source of income is as a .NET developer, using C#.]
I'm not opposed to Governments mandating the *internal*, i.e. Governmental, use of OSS, provided it's cheaper & more secure.
However, any proposal to force companies to adopt standards etc., is simple fascism. It's as bad as saying MS can't package whatever software it owns, in whatever way it wants. Oh wait, you've done that too, haven't you?
In NZ, we have a term for this type of behaviour - tall poppy syndrome.
This whole suggestion is ridiculous, and distasteful.
Let's say that we have OpenGL. It's an open standard. If this suggestion was implemented, anyone who develops their own API and libraries, which perform better or give better image quality for their specific application would be punished, just because that individual or organization is then trying to push a solution that does not conform to the open standard.
If Open Source claims that it competes through all the programmers contributing, and their bug-checking, why should we then push for a law that banishes competition and innovation?
Innovation is creating something new, that hasn't been done before. Not imitation, and all conforming to the same thing. Innovators have always been those who have broken away from the rest of the people. But instead, the more I see of the Open Source community, the more I see a community, stagnant in it's way and beliefs, and intent on gettings it's way, and preventing other choices. In effect forming a sort of monopoly, but in this case an ideological one, which goes against freedom of choice.
Please, compete through promoting the open standards, instead of working for a ban against innovation, because, for many solutions, not conforming to a standard can give much better results. The only thing an open standard helps with is ease of programming, and ease of immitating... And I'd also like it if the open source community would start to try and innovate, instead of only immitating what others have already done before. Browsing through SourceForge and Freshmeat, I've never seen anything inventive, only a different kind of implementation, or a direct immitation.
Personally, I use what works best for me, and what I need to do. I use Apache, Dreamweaver, PHP, Maya, CodeWarrior for programming C++ and Java(No, pundits, GCC is nowhere near CodeWarrior in speed, on any platform it supports. Especially not MIPS).
... althougth I'm sure to get flamed for my opinion. So be it.
Why? Not because I'm an anti-Microsoft bigot, though in large part I am, and not because I'm an open source advocate, although I am that as well. The reason is because I believe strongly in the value of open formats and protocols. Open formats are valuable for the industry as a whole, but I think govenments have a *responsibility* to ensure that the documents they produce on the public's behalf not be locked up, beholden to one software vendor.
Since open formats and protocols are so valuable, how is it that we don't currently force all our software vendors to publish their formats and protocols? Because the world at large hadn't realized how valuable they are (and perhaps we should thank Microsoft for that -- it's their abusive behavior that has made it so poignantly clear, even to less technical people). Given that we now realize it's important, how do we go about getting there?
There are a few obvious options:
Option 1 is the purely libertarian solution. I'm fairly libertarian, so it's appealing to me. However, it will be a very slow-acting solution, because the current closed format options are so deeply entrenched. For a country like South Africa, though, there's another issue: Do they really want to export all that cash to the US?
Option 2 is just distasteful. It's certainly going to be massively inefficient in the short run, and it's just plain wrong not to allow companies to at least attempt to compete with their CFP approaches.
Option 3 is, of course, what they've proposed. It is slightly offensive to my small-government sensibilities, but it really is a small, measured interference. Unlike, say Affirmative Action, which affects companies and citizens and requires a significant bureacracy to oversee it, this only affects government purchases and should be trivial to manage. The idea of the government taking Microsoft's money and giving it to random groups of open source developers would be deeply wrong, and if that's what they're planning (the article doesn't say), then I'm opposed. But that doesn't need to be the case.
In the short term, this action will increase government expenditures on software by 10%, which probably equates to a lot of money. That's a bad thing. In the long term, however, putting competition back into the picture will save them far more money. The competition isn't necessarily even OSS vs CSS -- if the government cat get OFP software, it doesn't matter if it's also OSS, because at least then other companies will be able to compete with the entrenched competitor, who will then be forced to compete on features and on price, as it should be.
The slickest thing about this proposal is that, unlike, say, Affirmative Action, it phases itself out automatically as it becomes unnecessary. As more OFP software becomes available (whether OSS or not), the government will buy less and less CFP software, reducing the "taxes" paid in. Eventually, the government will be using all OFP software, whether closed or open.
Here are some of the concerns I've seen in comments, and my responses:
Who are the open source developers who will get the money?
I think this one's easy to solve; the government should hire the developers and make them available to all of the government organizations, to build whatever kind of software is needed, with the caveat that all of the code will be open source. Why the requirement that it be open source, rather than just open format? Mainly because that way these developers can leverage the broad base of OSS that exists to make themselves more productive.
This (a) provides a valuable service to the government organizations who can get nicely customized software that they otherwise couldn't get at all, (b) keeps that software m
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
There's not much difference, both are wrong and very damaging to the free market.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.