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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.""
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.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
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.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
If various governments survive the embarrassment of Sexual Infidelity, Corruption, Law Breaking and various other political plagues...
Do you really think you can embarrass them by their choice of Operating System?
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 question to ask is:
How much money does Microsoft spend on each minister. That would be truly embarassing, specially in the US.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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.
a detailed report of what the government spends on what.
computers? thats a small minority of what the government spends money on, i'd like to see how much money goes to other stuff... corporate welfare perhapse?
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.
Two sites to check out are egovos.org and this one at netaction.org. There's also the other side.
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?"-
The way this is worded, that they are particularly targetting Microsoft products, makes this look less like a cost-cutting measure and more like a witch hunt.
Now, I'm no Microsoft supporter, but wouldn't it be much better for government officials to talk in more generalized terms? Don't attack Microsoft, attack the whole idea of a cash-strapped government using software that requires exorbitant licensing fees and overly restrictive licenses. Why not attack Oracle? Or Peoplesoft? They are just as bad as Microsoft is, just not quite as rich.
As far as mandating open source software across the board, that's a bad idea as well. What if there is no suitable open source project for the task at hand? Should the government fund its own open source project to create one? Sort of goes against the whole idea of saving money and decreasing beuracracy. Forcing the government to limit itself to software produced through one particular business model over another is pretty silly, IMO.
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'm of the firm opinion that open-source software should not be legislated for. Instead, it should compete on its own merits.
However, I'm also of the firm opinion that, at least for government documents, the format of the data should be, by law, an open format. That is, a format that is completely and openly described, and with an open-source viewer (as a reference implementation).
Furthermore, the software products that government workers use should, by default, save in the open format, without loss of functionality. In other words, "Save As..." doesn't cut the mustard.
Once that is in place, applications will be able to play on a more level playing ground. Furthermore, there won't be the risk of documents being lost because there is no longer any software available that can read them.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
The Liberal Party in Australia has morphed over the decades into something like your Republican Party only more right wing.
The Labour Party is usually considered by the Libs as a bunch a commies ... and yet they also have right wing tendencies (sometimes very).
The Democrats are made of left wing refugees from the Liberal Party and right wing refugees from the Labour Party. Sort of. Though I cried when they got rid of their leader Natasha Stott-Despoja ... a hot chick.
Bitter and proud of it.
The problem isn't that the Australian government is spending money on computers and software, but that the world's richest and one of the most politically powerful man on the earth has the government in a vice with its OS and other monopolies.
Bingo. Witness the Munich descision - it wasn't a move based on saving $ now, it was a strategic move to free themselves from a single-source vendor, who could potentially hold thier IT infrestructure hostage in some way, shape or form. What is really damaging to MS is the fact that this is a good, long term business decision that the astute businessman will recognize as such.
As more knowlegeable and informed people clue in to just how dependant they are on Microsoft (if they fall out of Microsofts good graces they're likley to have a rather expensive software audit on thier hands) they'll go for alternatives just to make sure they're in control of thier own software (and therefore business) from then on. Licensing 6.0 tipped Microsofts' hand way too much - it showed people that MS has lost a lot of respect for thier customers. That being the case, the end is inevitable. One year, 2 years, 5 years - doesn't matter. Zero-choice software is on it's way out, Freedom-of-choice software is on it's way in.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
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
It's much more difficult to argue against a law along the lines of "all Government information must be stored in an ISO approved format."
The Liberal Party in Australia is basically an analogue of the US Republicans or the British Conservatives, but without the religious zeal of the US Party (or at least without as *much* religious zeal).
Their ideology in brief:
- pro business, especially bigger business
- anti welfare
- anti affirmative action
- pro US, pro US foreign policy
- pro invasions of civil liberties in the name of defence against 'terror'
- terrible on the environment
- like to be divisive (known as 'wedge politics')
- HATE labour movements, unions, (left) student movements etc.
- anti immigration
- anti government regulation/intervention, preferring the 'free' market to run itself
They are very firmly on the right of politics. Despite the idiotic rantings of other posters, their name is extremely misleading, even to some Australians. In the last few years they have lurched sharply right, especially in the wake of September 11.
Despite what you may be told, they are *nothing* like the Libertarians. They want a strong, omniscient federal government and are constantly clashing with the judiciary, civil rights groups and minorities over their (ab)use of power. Their Attorney General also makes Joseph Goebbels look soft on terrorism.
Read Pynchon.
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
... before Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard.
That is, Sally Secretary at AT&T Bell Laboratories was using Unix to type up patent applications.
In retrospect, Bell Labs must have bad some bad-ass secretaries!
You're on the right track. It seems that everybody is missing the most important point, that of the "open" in open source software, which is the most important thing for Government use. Although cost should be an issue, it is not nearly as important as openness. The government is around to serve the people, and must make it's "output" must remain free, as in freedom, to all.
The government's "outputs" are of course things like laws and regulations, research, census statistics, environment and geological surveys, budgets, and so on. All of those things should be made available to the public who pay for it without restrictions. And that means that all the document formats used should not be beholden to copyright and patent ridden proprietary corporate software.
Just consider the National Archives, which publishes the Federal Register (the offical US publication which announces regulations and so forth. They have long understood that freedom concept and make all these regulations available as PDF and text, as well as their traditional paper-printed forms. There are no MS Word documents there, no encrypted eBooks. It is important that the public have free access to those publications, and that they remain perfectly readable 20 years from now (long after old Word versions become unreadable by the newer versions). Also it is important that the public be able to trust that what they are reading is authentic. Can I really trust Word to not recognize that when I'm reading a regulation on software piracy it silently inserts an extra little Microsoft sentence? Well, actually MS is not that evil, but the point is that I have no way to really know, the Word format is binary and proprietary and I can't verify that Word is displaying the correct output as I can't examine it's source or recompile it from source.
Governments should adopt OSS not for it's potential price benifits, but philosophically because it is open.
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...)
Something similar was tried in Denmark not too long ago. As it turned out, the problem was not to determine how much was spent on Microsoft products but rather how much could be saved using Open Source.
In late 2002 the Danish Board of Technology, an independent government body advising the parliament on matters of technology, published a report examining the applicability of Open Source in government. The report estimated that the public sector could save several billion Danish kroner (one Danish krone is approximately 0.15 dollars) per year by switching to Open Source software - which is a lot in a small country like Denmark. The figure caught a lot of average goverment IT managers by surprise and consequently generated a lot of discussion as to the accuracy of the numbers and methodology used in the report but I think the general consensus now is that the only way to find out for sure is to give it a try.
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.
Well, I hope this works and that somehow we can do something like this in the US.
I think it more likely though that the US will be embarrassed in a different way. As poorer countries in the world begin to computerize, and network themselves, there is a good chance they will rely on Open Source solutions to get started. India, and Brazil, notably have significant Linux user bases already. Eventually there will be some interesting comparisons I bet about how this has had an impact, not only on their cost of doing business, but the overall impact on computer literacy as well.
Watch someone who has NEVER used a computer use Windows for the first time. It's not a pretty sight. Windows is "intuitive" only after you have been using it for a year or so. The fact that most Windows programs use the same GUI elements, the same dropdown command set etc, makes each new program a bit easier to figure out than the previous ones. A large percentage of these new users will only learn the bare minimum to get by, and for them, it is to be expected that they will never want anything about that desktop to change.
A smaller percentage, but still a significant number of new users will want to learn more, such people in a Linux/Unix environment are instantly rewarded by how much stuff there is out there. They may shoot themselves in the foot a few times, but eventually these will be power users. Such a person, even without root access can do an order of magnitude more things on their own than a similarly motivated Windows user. I think this difference in user base will show up in subtle ways that will cause both business and governments in the US to wonder why we have been short changing ourselves.
Too bad they can't figure it out sooner.
What exact government necessary widgets is linux missing that windows and osx have? Too many people repeat the tired old "linux isn't ready for the desktop" line, without even really saying why.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
I think we should embarrass open source developers into making their desktop software usable.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
...in fact, any of the top distros typically come with at least three of anything Miss Blonde Secretary might need, with the possible exception of stuff that cannot be GPLed (video codecs and the like), and even most of that's just a URPMI (or three clicks) away.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...after he dropped out of Harvard. It was called Xenix, there was one on every desktop in Microsoft, and it was the next Great White Hope. Being Microsoft, of course they passionfingered that as well - but you get that. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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.
-- Cheers!
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
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.
This unique sig is intended to make this user more recognisable.
So, I'm sad to say, he isn't swedish (which I am), but he talks swedish.
Meep.
An excellent analogy. And, just like BSD, they fork every time a couple of the lead figures have a spat. I'm a little sore about the Dems; they did, after all, support the Australian version of the DMCA, but it looks like they might redeem themselves with this sort of thing.
If they manage to survive long enough, that is.
"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)
One WestOz minister had to stand up and explain that the Muja power station burned 4Mt of coal a year, at 3ppm Uranium (for the maths impared, equals 12t a year of Uranium up the stack, to say nothing of the radium and stuff). They went ahead a built a second coal power station, instead of one running off out abundant natural gas supplies (piped over from Canberra? :-) or a cleaner, cheaper nuke.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Open source is not free (as in beer), particularly on this scale. There are support costs, retraining costs, costs of investigating solutions in the first place...
If we get a proposal that compares genuine TCO for Microsoft with "free" software then of course a mostly uninformed public will jump up and down and ill-informed lobbyists will start clamouring for the money to be saved. Then in five years' time, they'll turn around and wonder what went wrong.
And as we've discussed on Slashdot before, any legislation that mandates the "consideration" of any specific product(s) over others, whether that's Microsoft, open source things or otherwise, is deeply flawed. They should require that everything relevant will be given equal consideration, but since that would be a tacit admission that this doesn't happen at present, we're unlikely to see that any time soon. You'd hope that it didn't require a law for that to be the case anyway, since all such a law would do is open up the floodgates for legal action against the government by every losing product's supporters.
The last bit of the story really said it: it's just hi-tech affirmative action, and affirmative action is rarely as good an idea in the long run as it seems at first.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.