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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."
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This is a tax on not having an open format and wanting to sell to government.
This statement really sets the tone for your post. Do you think it's a good thing to tax an entity for a want? Or to purchase a product and then tax the maker of that product for not meeting some standard that you know wasn't met before the purchase? Lunacy.
This is a tax on not having an open format and wanting to sell to government. Doing that is very similar to a sin tax on cigarettes, say, which many governments do as well.
No. If the proposal was "very similar to a sin tax on cigarettes" then government agencies buying MS products would have to pay.
It is about applying a tax to closed formats if they want to be involved with government.
Again with the "want" tax...that's just silly. What's worse - a 10% tax on the seller or a 100% tax on the seller? Perhaps the government could just avoid purchasing closed format products (if the government finds that desirable).
Also somewhat similar, say, to some fees charged by the US government when someone like Lockheed fails to produce documents by a certain date on a government contract.
And here's strike 3. It's not "somewhat similar". In the example you give, Lockheed is already under contract to the government. There are penalties built into these contracts and the government is just exercising its right to lever them.
Perhaps if you had read the article you would have seen a more reasonable proposal: "...a pre-set set-aside of between 10-20% of the IT procurement budget that will be used to procure Open Source products..." How about that? Voting with one's wallet? So novel...let's compare the two cases:
Case 1: Buy from MSFT and then charge MSFT an extra 10% to fund open source, whatever that means. So MSFT still makes a pile of money while a small amount of the sale goes to fund other development.
Case 2: Spend 10-20% of the budget procuring open source solutions. Not knowing the size of the budget makes it impossible to compare the monetary benefit to the open source community but it would appear that MSFT would receive fewer orders. This case mandates the use of open source products while the first case does not. Doesn't that seem like a better thing? If open source products can truly compete with commercial products then this case will lead to more adoption of these products.