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.""

Comments

where's the payback ?

[Sad Loser]

The democrats are usually a non-event, being third party in a two party state, like the liberal party in the UK.
However their founding motto is "keep the bastards honest", and I hope their new policy will include looking for Microsoft payback (election campaign contributions anybody?) as I am sure this will be fruitful.

Not quite ready

[egg troll]

Admittedly the cost of buying software is a valid concern. Yet its not the only one. There are also costs such as training and lost productivity. While Linux and the BSDs are excellent server OSes, I hope the Australian government would think long and hard before adopting them for workstation use.

As much as I love Open Source (I'm typing this via Moz on FreeBSD!), I don't think I could recommend it to Sally Secretary quite yet. Its still got a bit more polishing to do. 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.

Hopefully, though, a widespread adoption of it as a server OS will encourage those working on its workstation aspects to really get a move on so we can rid the world of MS products.

Re:Not quite ready

[smash]

Actually, I think the difficulty of use of open source software is a little over-rated.

Most of my users can barely use Windows anyway - any administration tasks are the responsibility of the IT people - which is no harder in Linux/BSD/etc than in Windows - often easier.

There are open standards to support most of a businesses needs (LaTex (Klyx, etc)), HTML, Postgresql, Mozilla, etc.

Any custom applications will need to be written by someone paid for by the government anyway - why not base them on an open platform?

Granted, its slightly more difficult (thought by no means impossible) to accomplish all this as a small business (you have to interact with the rest of the world - deal with word documents, etc), but a government is big enough to say "either send us stuff in compatible format, or don't deal with us".

Its a case of short term expense, for long term freedom of choice, and control over your standard operating enviornment.

smash.

Re:Not quite ready

[Pieroxy]

It would be true with closed source, but with open-source software, end-users can put their resources toward getting the features they want, rather than toward paying Microsoft every few years.

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 ?

And the nice thing about OSS is that you don't really need to do mass upgrades to new major versions

Let's not take the RedHat vs. Microsoft example then. RedHat drops old versions a lot faster than MS.

You know, if MS doesn't do it, there is probably one reason: It does not make big bucks. And remember all the distros out there are made by companies that care about big bucks also.

Two sites...

[pen]

Two sites to check out are egovos.org and this one at netaction.org. There's also the other side.

It's not fair

[tsa]

As long as the amounts spent are not put into a context (by for instance showing how much can be saved if OSS is used) the amounts spent are meaningless. Some of the public may have heard about OSS, and they may know that it's 'free', but hey, Munich spend around 35 million Euros on OSS (IIRC) and that was even more expensive than going for the MS solution. Therefore this is only useful if the public is also informed about the costs and profits and drawbacks of alternatives to MS software. And why focus only on MS? That is also not fair. I can't believe the government only spends money on MS software. Conclusion: this proposal sucks.

Re:Not quite ready? Of course it is.

[SiggyRadiation]

I used to help administer a hospital-informationsystem.

This was a unix-alike system (although the OS was *proprietary*). Users used terminals/terminal-emulators.

It had a appliction for writing letters about the patients. This application was only used by secretaries. The firm that made it also had a plugin for MSword. Using this plugin users didn't need to use the terminal-based application, but they could write their letters in Word, fill in some database form-fields and send it over to the system.

So the users could choose between:
- terminal-based word-processor
and
- MS-Word-with-plugin.

Our experiences were:
- New end/or temporary staff liked to use Word, since everyone knows word so training-time is shorter (and thus you get more productive hours from those people that only stay for a week).
- Experienced staff *liked* and *chose* to use the terminal-based version. Reasons: it was more responsive, less error-prone, no need to use the mouse (switching left hand keys->mouse->keys->mouse->....), more productivity (it took less time to initiate a new letter, to save it).

Secretaries and non-IT-skilled staff have for long been able to use all kinds of IT-systems (with proper training). I was surprised to see that they sometimes actually chose to use a unix-alike when there was also Word. So here you have it: what counts in the long run is functionality. Does the application do what you want from it, does it do it effectively, efficiently and reliably? GIU is a plus, but no more than that.

MrPrince.

Re:Not quite ready? Of course it is.

[Wacky_Wookie]

"This whole mentality of using a "desktop environment" is one of the worst crutches the computing industry has been hobbled with."

I agreed with most of your post, but I'm, going to have to complain about this bit.

I think OS's should have even more time spent on making better GUI's, with as much written language removed from it as possible. Humans have fantastic abilities to process pure images (i.e. pure graphical UI's); it's when humans have to deal with written language (i.e. Text only UI) that you get hobbled.

I for one, would not be in the Job I am in, if it had not been for desktop GUI's. I'm Dyslexic, and as a result I had horrible troubles learning and using command line only interfaces. You see, my reading was not very good back then, I had to learn how to speed-read because my brain processes language in a completely different way to the average person. As for spelling, ha, try using a command line if you can't spell. Not only that, I can't even see most of my mistakes, even after going over a statement several times.

I was not really into computers till I got my hands on Apples and later Macs in school. Once I learned the concepts of basic computing from using desktop GUI's (which relied on my image processing skills, instead of my non-existent language skills) I was able to carry those skills over to command line interfaces. I'd prolly be Anti-Computer still if I had not been able to learn on a Desktop GUI.

It's not just people with "learning disabilities". I can sit down at a PC running Windows, or a Mac running OS X in a Spanish/French/Greek/Japanese Internet café, without being able to speak or read a word of any of those languages, and I can still surf the net.

I think a pure GUI, void of any written language is the Holy Grail of computing as far as I'm concerned. It would not matter what your native language was, you would be able sot sit down, and use the computer.

(For the record, I'm not "stuck with GUI's, I was able to become very proficient with command line interfaces in the end. I used BBS before the Internet was even available, and the first time I logged into the Internet was on a Commodore 64. And yes, I had to spell check this post)