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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?
But who's gonna get the money? There's hardly one big open-source organisation entitled to all the money.
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.
The idea of MS paying a 10% tax to fund OSS seems neat, but its really not good. Not good in principle, not good in practice, not good in theory.
Some things would happen:
1. MS would design and publish standards that are so nasty and obscure that even skilled coders would have a hard time making any sense of it. That would get them off the hook and still not achieve open standards.
2. The software industry as a whole would suffer. Open standards are nice for interoperability, but not so nice for new development. Most standards are not easily made extensible with any sense. If they are extensible that's a loop for MS to exploit. The bottom line would be that new development by MS or any other software maker would suffer. Additionally the OSS world will also suffer. Good things happen when new software is written to do new things. Using the blunt hammer of government to dictate how software works is not a good solution. As soon as government determines it can make MS conform to its technical "guidelines", how long will it be before individuals and not-for-profits are bound and regulated the same way?
3. MS's customers will simply suffer an additional 10% or more price raise which they are still mostly required to pay. On the other end, myraid of companies will spring up to do OSS work, crowding out a lot of the good community that has sprung up. These organizations will suck up funding. The projects will also essentially be the same as commerical software projects minus closed source, and as a result software will follow commerical software trends - feature bloat, buginess, and using gimmicks to gain market share (and justify their continued funding).
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
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?
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.
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.