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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."
Support them in some form? What if Microsoft supports a standard, and then adds on it, thus requiring others to use the "enhanced" standard? Is that still compliance? What if some other OSS group wants to extend a standard to meet their needs? Would they be limited?
I'm conflicted. The open source advocate in my LOVES the idea of 10% of Microsoft sales to a government going to fund Open Source. The libertarian in me says this smells like governments interfering in with free market principles. HELP! I need a bunch of Slashdot users to tell me what to think! ;)
My journal has hot
But who's gonna get the money? There's hardly one big open-source organisation entitled to all the money.
Good idea, but I don't think it's exactly legal to have a monetary penalty for companies who write proprietary/non-compliant software. You just don't buy their stuff, and if they want your business, they'll have to adapt or go out of business. So, switching to open-source might eventually force Microsoft to head that way, but charging them a fee for non-compliance with this policy is antithetical to an open market.
IAALS.
That would be billions of dollars to Open Source to compensate for an unlevel playing field until it is leveled.
That isn't leveling the field for open source, it's tilting the field unfairly in favor of open source. If the technology can't compete on its own merits, why throw good money after bad to support it? Of course, I think open source software can compete on its own merits, so this measure is redundant.
It's just a high-tech double standard, and that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
What an awful idea. Yeah, let's have the government decide what is better for the market, since the market obviously cannot decide for itself! *sigh* Having the mafia on your side does not make it a mafia any less...
1) Who defines which standards are open? (And will governments agree on what that means, or will a software company have to internationalize their interfaces to support one standard in one country and another standard in another?)
2) Isn't this already happening in a less official way? If you're a non-US government, just mention Linux and you too can get a huge price break from Microsoft (probably even bigger than the 5-10% proposed non-compliance fee).
It would be nice if governments that wrestle such price breaks from Microsoft turned around and used those funds to generate additional open source tools, but governments have a lot of competing needs to deal with, and the freed up funds are more likely to go to any underfunded services (and any government service is going to have defenders that say that their particular niche is underfunded).
While this plan is just good economic common sense (tax the rich to feed the poor), I have to question its applicability in South Africa. These people need medicine, clean drinking water, and a strong police force, not software, be it open source or otherwise.
Even if it passes, the government will probably be overthrown in another four months. A major victory this isn't.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
Stealing 10% from Microsoft just because they're Microsoft isn't a good thing, even if it is to fund Open Source. How would that level the playing field, anyway? Microsoft would still have revenues measured in billions of dollars, so what if the open source guys get some of their chump change?
Microsft needs to fail as a business on it's own merits, not on the merits of extorting 10% of their money and using it to further the Open Source cause.
Well, it will be billions of dollars to somebody.
I understand the appeal of reaching into someone else's pocket for money, but there are people out there far better at getting their fingers into every pie than open source developers.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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...
This article should be moderated -1 Flamebait. The idea of forcing MS into following standards is absurd, and if it wasn't for deep anti-MS sentiment in the community here, this would have never been posted!
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
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
They said nothing about the source.. unless I missed that part.. They want the standards opened up. The OSS peoples still have to code their own stuff, but they atleast have standards to code by then.
Can all fish swim?
The problem comes in on what definition of compliance you use. It's as much a legal term as a technical one. A notorious rat hole. How often to people around here debate the various browsers' html compliance? I don't think this would work.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
I'm concerned about this idea on two fronts:
1) First, this seems to conflict with principles of a free market. Without a doubt, Microsoft clearly has engaged in anti-competitive practices. But, aren't open source solutions at the point where it really is a viable option, if organizations take the time to implement it carefully?
2) Second, wouldn't an organization like Microsoft merely jack up negotiated costs on software to accommodate for the "loss" of a percentage of sales for monies moved to fund open source development?
Hmm.
Dear Mister Silver,
It has come to our attention that you used the phrases "Bill Gates", "Slashdot", "SCO" and "pigs fly" in your recent post.
We represent www.pigsfly.com, and your unauthorized use of pigsfly's trade secret mark copright thingy is completely unacceptable. Please correct this infraction immediately, or we will tell Bill Gates, SCO, and Slashdot.
Or something! Muahahaha!
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
OK, after thinking about it, here's my take on the thing.
1. There is a part of me that likes the idea of "If you don't comply with the Open Standards, then part of your profit from your sale will go to finance a community that will." As it says, it levels the playing field. What would happen if the Open Office folks suddenly had $5 million to hire programmers and work on making Open Office better? How long until everybody supported XML based document formats that were all truly interchangable?
2. The big issue. Who the hell gets to decide on what the "Open Standard" we like is? Oh, sure, everybody's got documents/spreadsheets in XML - but suppose we decide that some display feature available in one Open Source Office system is the "standard Open Document" and the other isn't? I've seen companies all the time declare they follow "Open" standards - when they control it lock, stock and barrel. (It's Open because you can bitch about it in public.)
3. I don't mind seeing Government Money go into research grants that can then be used to finannce open source projects to fulfill XYZ needs, and the code/research being put under the GPL so everybody can use it (we're not going into a "Governments should GPL everything/no, they should BSD everything here - it's an example, thank you, move on").
4. If they truly want to penalize a business for using proprietary standards, stop buying their stuff. You'll be amazed how quickly a business goes from "Well, we need to do everything under Novell eDirectory because Government Office XYZ does it" to "Well, Government Office ABC says 'no more proprietary', and they've stated LDAP is the standard now - so code to that." Trickle down from there - the companies that support government follow it, so the companies that support those companies follow it, and on down the line.
So while the idea does make me go "Oh, yet - take money from the rich and give to the poor", I think there's better ways of going about it than "All your base [code] are belong to use!"
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
[some bozo] 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.
Ooh, la de la, we all live in fairy-tale land.
I think I'm going to propose a system where all of the fruit loops working on Python and Java all decide to work on Perl 6 instead! La-de-la!
Oooooh, and I think that Dell should give 10% of their profits to Apple until they both have an equal share of the marketplace, la-de-la!
And I think all members of the Linux 'cult' should pay a tithe of their income to help support poor old SCO, la-de-la!
It's okay proposing nonsense, but it's whether it's actually legal and feasible that counts. This project is neither.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Microsoft wouldnt be the only one to be paying for this. There are a hundred other firms working on OS projects. I mean, come on guys, lets be realistic!
And what's wrong with the situation as is? I like Linux's "underground movement" apect, it gives it more legitimacy as a labor of love, not $$$. And Red Hat is just now starting to turn a profit, if that's what you are intersted in!
One more reason to keep an eye on your money.
Bill Gates becomes popular on Slashdot
;)
According to this googlefight, Bill Gates is more popular than Linus Torvalds on Slashdot.
My journal has hot
I can see the comments already: unethical blah blah, free enterprise blah blah. Tell me this: what is a difference between the Gov bailing out businesses and industries (think Airlines in US, Banks in Japan) and this proposal?
This is not the way to handle funding open source. As much as I would love to take Microsoft down a notch or two, robbing from software companies to pay for the development of competitor's products is the worst idea since communism. Oh, wait, it is pretty much communism, isn't it?
Let market forces decide who lives and who dies. If that is Microsoft, so be it. It is not government's place to support open source at the cost of other legitimate businesses.
In fact, this could be about the worst thing that could possibly happen to the software industry. With this 10% tax on closed source software, there would be reduced incentive to produce software for profit. Without profit, developers would not get paid as well. Innovation would shrivel and eventually die, even among open source developers. Developer skills to atrophy and before long the only software produced would be paid for directly by government. We all know how efficient government is, donâ(TM)t we?
This might sound alarmist, but I am a big believer in the free market determining the survival of products and companies. That is the only surefire way to ensure quality products at a reasonable price (or free).
Phathead
While government procurement policy should be neutral to ensure that governments do not introduce market distortions into the world economy, there should be an appreciation of the social benefits of fostering Open Source software development in a proper Open Source Government Policy plan
Wonder what functions I will find in the "Social Benefit" API.
This is industrial policy writ large... If we want to see the software industry go down the same path as the steel industry, this is the map to use.
Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings! -Feynman, maybe
I think that the way that Transgaming and Codeweavers (Winex and Crossover respectively) manage revenue collection / open source application source generation is very intelligent. For a small fee, you get their 'enhanced' version of an open source program (wine), for which they get paid. In return, both companies contribute to the source of the main project with well bug-tested code. It may be a rev or two behind their 'pay' applications, but it allows the project to make great leaps and bounds being funded totally by commercial use.
Personally - I have purchaced both and use them extensively to get to everything from Office 2000 to Diablo II working on my Linux boxes at home and work. I like that with Winex, I purchace a 'subscription' for $5 a month, which I can discontinue at any time, which only cuts me off from updating my binary.
If Microsoft was willing to publish 'old' API suites for free (even ones for Windows 9x), it would be a step in the right direction. It would give the communities of Windows Application Developers a stand on the playing field for begining to develop stable applications in the new (XP / Windows 2003 Server) environment.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
Stupid...dumb...idiotic...preposterous - those are just a few words that come to mind. The government should really leave businesses alone for the most part. Seriously...
I hope I don't get modded down for that. I use OpenSource software, but Gates was right when he wrote that paper of his years ago -- there is no "real" money with OpenSource. And no money leads to no jobs leads to bad economy leads to...(vicious cycle ensues).
This is too simplistic a view because it ignores patent and licensing issues. Is PDF open? Is Flash/SWF open? Is MP3 open? Is MPEG open? All those formats are "made known", and users can develop programs...of course they may have to pay a bit or submit to certain restrictions.
Now, ONE of the formats I listed there really is open. Do you know which one? I encourage you all to go to the Open Data Format Initiative site and join the mailing list, where we are hashing out just exactly what an open format should be for government use.
- adam
In fact, let's extend it some more! I've always wanted to open a fast food restaurant, Mcdonald's has such an unfair advantage due to their existing market share. Let's require Mcdonald's to pay 10% of their profits to people like me who haven't been as successful so far.
Ah, yes, lets take lessons about Equal Opportunity from South Africa... bwwwahhhhha ha ha!
Although Open Source has it's benefits, this new law is not the way to advocate it. The world doesn't revolve around Microsoft, many companies would be affected by this. The average computer user doesn't care whether the source code is available or not, they want the program just work. This type of bullying is what Microsoft pulled for many years and got caught.
If the author of the program doesn't want to show their code, they shouldn't be penalized for it. Furthurmore it will hurt the entire hobbyist/shareware movements which barely make any money to begin with. I hope this sort of communist approach isn't passed in North America, because both OSS/Closed-source programs have their benefits. The whole point of OSS was to have choice, not to have choice while penalizing the competition.
Doing that is very similar to a sin tax on cigarettes, say, which many governments do as well. It is a method of encouraging behavior that a government decides is desirable.
One can certainly argue whether or not doing such things is a desirable function of government, but it is not just about tilting playing fields towards open source. It is about applying a tax to closed formats if they want to be involved with government.
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.
I forget what 8 was for.
This reminds me of the problems surrounding SCO: they can't stand on their own two feet, so they sue every major company to acquire *their* feet.
I think this is an unfair move as I see others have already posted. Everyone knows that it's hard to make money off OSS (some of the questions to Hans Reiser asked about that) but there is no reason to penalize companies who can make money so that OSS can stands on *its* own two feet.
Whatever your stance is (for or against OSS or Microsoft - and, hey, there are many others to be fair), it's hard to deny that this is a foul play in the world of free markets.
This is moronic. There is no way we should make someone pay for to help their competitor. Imagine being told that you have to give up 10% of your salary and give it to the intern, because he can't find a way to be profitable.
Red Hat found a way to make money off of open source and everyone is mad at them for being the M$ of Linux. This is simply a case of goverment trying to control the free market, not the free market controling itself.
When the typical person sees a problem they instinctively say "we need a law!" If this person is slightly more sophisticated they might say "we need a regulation, tax, fee, oversight committee, etc". But no matter what words they use, the typical response to a problem is an increase in government power.
Is there a problem with the balance of FS and PS in the marketplace? Of course! But why must we instinctively rush to the government to solve the problem? We do we treat government as a god that we pray to for health, wealth and bountiful harvests?
If there is a bad law then by all means it is proper to eliminate it via a good law. If the FS/PS disparity is due to bad law, then let's eliminate that bad law. If it's due to obsolete bidding rules then let's change the bidding rules.
But this proposal doesn't do that. It's a prayer to the god'vernment to save the petitioner from the heathen proprietary hordes.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
OSS is free, MS products are expensive. In principle at least, that is a tremendous obstacle for MS. The main problems for OSS today are 1) making an OS product that is easier to install, use, and maintain than Windows XP, and 2) make OpenOffice easier to use than MS Office, and able to easily share files with it. This has to be true for the most naive and computer-phobic users.
Hello everybody! Those two conditions have not been met!
The idea of giving OSS a multi-billion dollar enema is absolutely terrible. It will guarantee corruption, bureaucracy, and irrelevance. OSS will become the IT equivalent of a corrupt Third-World dictatorship. When that happens, MS wins again.
..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?
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."
I didn't read the article very thoroughly, so take this comment with a grain of salt, but it seems to me that Open Source has little to do with Open Standards, except coincidentally. I could very easily write a closed-source application that implements an open standard, or I could write an open-source application that uses a proprietary data format.
To me, these are apples and oranges and the article refers to the terms ambiguously. I'm all for government supporting open standards, but I'm leery of supporting a particular development methodology such as open source. Security though, IMHO, is a valid basis for supporting open source (due to increased peer review).
One other question: who gets to determine whether a given software package "supports" a given open standard? I'm sure Microsoft would say that IE supports CSS 2, but that doesn't necessarily make it true. Likewise, there's probably always going to be something that somebody could use to say that it's not 100% supported. Seems to me there's a continuum here, and more definition is needed.
Read my keyboard review.
But at least you have the source in the OSS ones, so you can fix them/have-them fixed, and made standards compliant.
I never said they were the same....
In any case, my tried-and-true simplistic worldview is shattered. And I haven't had my mid-afternoon coffee yet...
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.
The government HAS to get the source code, while the source code can be kept from prying eyes and its just an insurance against the supplier going bankrupt and vanishing (think it can't happen, think what if Enron sold energy management software as well,) taking its software with it.
The vendor can enter into non-compete agreements with the government and the code never gets out unless the vendor goes tits-up.
The government HAS to get the file formats and they HAVE to be entered into the public domain. Otherwise interoperability is impossible.
No compliance, no sale.
Simple, clean and fair. No preferential treatments for anybody and no more shifting software base costing billions every year.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
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.