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Embarrassing Governments Into Adopting Open Source
caitsith01 writes "An effort is currently underway to embarrass the Australian Federal Government into adopting open source software. As this story explains, the Australian Democrats have put questions on notice in Parliament that will require all government ministers to disclose how much money their departments spend on Microsoft products each year. The idea is to force open source issues to the fore by showing just how much money Microsoft receives from the government. It could be a smart approach - the average taxpayer knows little or nothing about OSS, but will rapidly form and express vocal opinions about the government wasting money. The article also mentions that a bill may be introduced to Federal Parliament to mandate the consideration of open source solutions (you may remember this story about an Australian state trying to introduce similar legislation). Some quotes from the article: "What the country doesn't need is to be tied into a profit-maximising licensing system, and the way to combat that is to get government to break out of the paradigm." On the other hand, the (right wing) Liberal Party criticises suggestions that use of open source should be compulsory as "hi-tech affirmative action.""
What do you mean payback?
I am glad to see them doing this sort of thing... even if the system is effectively two party this type of action is a good way for minor parties to raise issues that the major parties would basically ignore.
Read Pynchon.
Usually you don't find government adopting new tech earlier than private enterprise, but with Linux it seems to be working the other way (or at least both ways). And I'd say that a major reason for that is anti US sentiment.
It may not be ready for secretaries etc... but there is a big difference between getting a site licence for MS Office and paying M$ jillions of dollars for MSDN subscriptions, ongoing support etc etc etc because your entire back end runs on their software.
./ are probably *nix aware and skilled, but there are a huge number of people who do technical diplomas and the like and never even see a non-MS system.
I think a key issue is training of technical people. Most people on
A move for more open source in government should be coupled with a push to bring non-proprietry software back to the core of computer related education. I'm lucky in that I have a Comp Sci degree from a university that has a strong focus on Unix and its derivatives, but I know a lot of people who are trained purely in MS and Oracle stuff.
Read Pynchon.
Whether it is or not, by asking the questions on notice in parliament the various ministers will be forced to stand up and tell the parliament how much they have spent on MS products. The point is to highlight the facts in a very public forum.
Read Pynchon.
I hope the Australian government would think long and hard before adopting them for workstation use.
The longer and harder you think, the more time gets wasted. You lose nothing when givng Linux a try.
I don't think I could recommend it to Sally Secretary quite yet.
How did your Sally Secretary learn to use Windows and Office? Osmosis? I doubt it. Trining isn't a factor for normal users.
In Gnome, for example, I occasionally get a dialog box that says " occurred. For more information, click on the help button." Naturally there is no help button.
In MS Office, Sally frequently gets "It appears you are typing a letter" message. Does she know how to turn it off? Is there a toll free MS support number she can contact?
What about " Program performed illegal operation. Instruction could not be Read" messgaes? Those pop-ups? Those BSODs? Does BSOD come with a Help button?
Please.. think before you troll.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I actually think the liberals are right on this one. Open source should not be mandatory, however neither should Microsoft.
End of the day governements, like all organisations need to use the right product for the right job. It is not a bad idea for government departments to have to investigate open source solutions however to make them mandatory is madness.
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
I hope you've reported that bug :)
Or fixed it!
Gnome and the rest of the open source apps are *really* nice now. Both my parents use linux now(and like it better). Neither of them are very heavy computer users but it seems to have worked better for them.
No spyware, system crashes, viruses, less spam, less advertising. Overall I think that improves productivity.
Of course I tailored each of their systems to them. Gave them assistance for a few days. But I did that for windows anyway(and spent longer at it).
Apps like email, web browsing, office stuff are *very* similar to windows programs.
Custom applications designed poorly(dependant on a single platform) are the main things holding people back. Many custom programs can be filled with open source programs.
Wine, win4lin, and vmware can be used in the transition to linux.
Have fun!
The point of this exercise is to look at how much the Australian government spends on Microsoft licenses (at a guess, multiple tens of millions of dollars annually), and ask whether it would be a better use of those funds to enhance open source software so that it meets government requirements. Tens of millions of dollars annually employs a lot of people...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Whats the cost to Australia of all that money going to the USA when some of the money could go to employee people in Australia to make OSS practical for all aplications?
USA gets less money
Australian unemployement goes down.
Whats wrong with OSS for sally?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I'd say that asking hard questions about spending is exactly "keeping the bastards honest" and has nothing to do with "payback".
You mean, they can check-out the file via CVS, make their enhancement, and then submit their changes to Linus ?
You know we're talking about secretaries, don't you ?
*sigh*... That's what a supplier is for.
For example, if Ms. Plunkett the secretary at AcmeCorp realises that the wordprocessor she's using doesn't handle mailmerge, she can call up her organisation's support section. If the support section thinks it's a feature that will be widely needed, they can talk to their supplier (say, IBM) and ask for this feature to be included in the next upgrade. IBM can see if that feature has been implemented in a later version and upgrade AcmeCorp to that version or backport it to AcmeCorp's current version, or they can add it themselves and supply AcmeCorp with that version, or they can farm it out to a third party, or they can finance the original developers to add that feature, or they can tell AcmeCorp that it's not worth their time to add such a feature, in which case AcmeCorp can do the same thing IBM did - add the feature themselves, backport it, pay a third party to implement it, or pay the original developers to include it.
It's so much easier when everybody has equal access to the source, isn't it?
The fact remains that the Federal Government won't be embarrassed at the large (wasteful?) sums of money it spends on IT infrastructure because it does not listen to the IT industry.
Even when the Australian IT Minister (Richard Luddite Alston) spent 4 million dollars on his website, the uproar was loud in the IT sector, but nonexistent elsewhere.
...and don't get me started on the shitful state of broadband in this country.
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
Not that I'm the biggest MS supporter, but you want a few good reasons why they shouldn't just roll on out a new system:
1. Retraining costs. For an entire Government
2. Required software doesn't exist, or isn't as functional as under MS-platforms. Exchange is the biggest kicker - there are free alternatives, but not much matches the functionality. It is de facto.
3. Support staff. You've got an entire IS infrastructure built around supporting the platform. I agree, the tail should not wag the dog, but the cost of retraining these guys to become necessarily savvy with Linux may even be more than point 1.
4. MS has a support infrastructure that is much better suited to helping large organisations meet their IS roles than any Linux based organisation, especially here in Australia.
These are just off the top of my head. Like I said, standard slashdot disclaimer - I'm hardly an MS sympathiser - but with the en masse discounts MS offers big organisations like Governments, and the potential pitfalls that changing to Linux could involve, I would want the Government to be very wary of wandering down this path. I especially agree with the "mandatory" selection of an OS - as always, it should be best tool for the job.
-- james
You mean, they can check-out the file via CVS, make their enhancement, and then submit their changes to Linus ?
Wow there is this amazing compiler now called GCC, it takes source code and makes it into an executable program! If Linus doesn't accept it, or it takes a long time to get into the main codebase, you can still compile it yourself, and you can still be running a final product!
You know we're talking about secretaries, don't you ?
Yeah but secretaries aren't that intense in the software that they use. And the secretaries aren't going to be the people out doing the software development. You could take the money wasted on MS software, and pay a person to develop something that is totally custom based off existing code. Hell my parents and my younger sister seem to be able to use linux just fine. OpenOffice, Mozilla, Evolution, all work perfectly well. If gnome doesn't float your bubble, then there's KDE and a billion other WM's. You probably are going to be locking down your secretaries computer from doing advanced features anyways, we don't want her updating DNS records or anything.
Let's not take the RedHat vs. Microsoft example then. RedHat drops old versions a lot faster than MS.
Yeah, except you don't have to pay for newer versions of RedHat. You just continue paying for the support. And the support includes helping you upgrade. The bitch with MS, is that they drop the old software, but that forces you to continue to pay for support AND pay for the newer versions of software. So, IMHO RedHat still beats the crap out of Microsoft.
And remember all the distros out there are made by companies that care about big bucks also.
WRONG. There are a few distros out there made by companies that care about big bucks. How about Gentoo? How about Knoppix? How about Debian? How about College Linux? Or Vine or Rock or IPCop or RedFlag... The list goes on...
And yet throughout this history, we've somehow managed to organize large nation states and watch empires nearly conquer entire hemispheres without spending millions of dollars on bloated software.
There is an important lesson here. Despite the clamor on this discussion board, it is not "Linux r0x0rs!". It is that people often come up with good tools for specific tasks to control the environment -- this (and language of course) is our defining characteristic. Most secretaries use windows PCs so they can run MS-Word. That's a whole lot of licensing fees to pay to MSFT for what is essentially a glorified typewriter.
So to get to my point... Before you bash unices as being too hard for Sally Secretary to use, consider this. Create a distro that emulates a typewriter exactly. No command prompt, no shell, no KDE, no Mozilla, no translucent alpha blended windowing system. Just a typewriter. And it's free, and you can run it easily on a $200 computer.
Start there and then add whatever else you need. Don't start with a general purpose computing platform and complain that it's too hard to use. Of course it's too hard. This whole mentality of using a "desktop environment" is one of the worst crutches the computing industry has been hobbled with. Somehow the concepts of "BIOS" and "DOS" evolved from a set of useful low-level I/O routines into a horribly bloated general purpose machine with so many points of failure, that we're often spending more money now on IT and training than on the machines and the people who actually use them!
(BTW don't take this as a MSFT bash. I feel as strongly about Apple's overly general approach to computing, though at least their momentum seems to be toward a more controlled environment. And all the people working on Linux window managers and trying to make their Linux machines have a "START" button and "My Computer"... Jesus, it makes me sick...)
But requiring files to be in a particular format, an open format, at least gives open source software a chance. If not now, then in the future. Microsoft is famous for trying to lock users into their software and this would prevent that.
So what I say is require standards, and use the best software for the job.
In the interest of actually advancing the cause of F/OS/S adoption, I'm going to take a stab at playing devil's advocate to your response to egg troll. I am concerned here that this is all the further the scene's participants consider the issues, and it is a death sentence unless we can establish more logical and reasonable arguments, rather than this standard 'OOH BSODS ARE TEH SUKC" arguments:
The longer and harder you think, the more time gets wasted. You lose nothing when givng Linux a try.
oh? you loose hundreds of hours in training, across the org.
How did your Sally Secretary learn to use Windows and Office? Osmosis? I doubt it. Trining[sic] isn't a factor for normal users.
actually, she learned it thanks to a consistent graphical metaphor and standards that work across apps. let's not forget the much simpler fat file tree and 3 digit extension and the lack of 10 different directories to control 8 different aspects of an installed app. You may scoff, after all, this unix-y stuff is familiar to you. The windows environment is far simpler to grasp and always the same. that is to stay, the environment is stable, even if some of the apps aren't. *nixes are wildly varient. just take the switch from netscape's "Alt-C" for copy to Moz's "Ctrl-C" for copy, and you'll have your proof of what I'm saying.
In Gnome, for example, I occasionally get a dialog box that says " occurred. For more information, click on the help button." Naturally there is no help button.
In MS Office, Sally frequently gets "It appears you are typing a letter" message. Does she know how to turn it off? Is there a toll free MS support number she can contact?
wtf? she can ignore the clip. r-click on it and choose hide assistant. couldn't be simpler.
What about " Program performed illegal operation. Instruction could not be Read" messgaes[sic]? Those pop-ups? Those BSODs? Does BSOD come with a Help button?
fwiw, BSODs haven't been a problem for years. and when they were, 99% of the time it was the result of 3rd party developers stomping all over the memory space of a kernel that was working to support 20+ years of legacy apps and hardware. And professionals all over the world understand this.
Please.. think before you troll.
Maybe you should stop and think before you advocate with thoughtless zealotry. You are hardly going to accomplish anything with foolish knee-jerking, nor are you contributing to the serious discussion of these matters by echoing the party-line. How are we ever going to shake the MSFT yoke with shallow stick shaking like this?
The point is to highlight the facts in a very public forum.
Sorry, but parliament is not exactly a very public forum. Big Brother Up Late got better ratings than Senate Question Time (Late rerun). Big Brother Up Late is watching people sleep. Literally.
Someone intelligent below pointed out the $4M Alston departmental website. I agree, it needs to be pointed out, but nothing will eventuate unless this waste of money is shown to everyone. Not only does everyone need to be made aware of the amount spent, they have to be aware of the other available options. My mother, knowing nothing about computers, would think it perfectly reasonable to spend $1.4M on website development. She has no idea that there is an alternative.
What we need to do is bring it to the public's attention that there are viable alternatives (OSS) which cost less. And we can't do that simply through the parliamentary process, and with our current media companies we won't get it on the mass media. I'm afraid talks in parliament arn't enough. Ideas anyone?
"But everyone should know everything." -markab