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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.
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 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."