Slashdot Mirror
The Economist on Open Source in Government
locarecords.com writes "The Economist has an excellent article about Microsoft attempting to undermine the Open Source and Free Software movements. Particularly interesting are the issues relating to proprietary software and government and how other countries are mandating free software in government software projects."
Make sure your market is not undermined by the competition, free or otherwise.
Looks like the Department of Defense has actuallygiven the nodto open source - or at least recognized its existence.
Some foreign national cyber-terrorist could include malicious code in our govermental code. Think of the security implications. Plus, we'd be indirectly supporting the effort of another, possibly communist country. The majority of Microsoft's money comes from the US government, their biggest client. To paraphrase Harry S. Truman, "What's good for Microsoft is good for the United States."
> > That said, open-source is no panacea, and there are many areas where proprietary products are still far superior.
> I wish the zealots would at least concede that much before blasting the horrible , horrible, evil, closed, proprietary software.
OK, consider it conceded. Now can we please get on with the blasting?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I don't mind if govt uses open source or not. The best product for the situation should be used. What I do want do see is "open" document formats to allow them to switch software providers easily.
To have this analysis show up in The Economist rather than Slashdot or LWN, etc, is a bad omen for Microsoft.
It's just as easy to lie as to tell the truth. What's hard is keeping the lie standing long enough to fool your target. The truth takes less energy to maintain.
"Even if you are on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there" - Will Rogers
Microsoft is business; businesses must always compete hardball for government contracts, in any sector, be it software, hardware, equipment, construction. It's no surprise that it's offering special deals to preserve it's market share, that's what you'd expect any business to do.
There are many businesses behind the open source movement: Red Hat, IBM, Sun. Don't doubt that they aren't competing just as hard for the same contracts. And open source has a big advantage over Microsoft - the number of vocal advocates that are willing to promote it without payment. In fact, you'll find many of them here on Slashdot.
there are many areas where proprietary products are still far superior
Yes, but considering the progress of OSS over the last decade, given time and continued success this will soon no longer be the case. It is only a matter of time before OSS dominates in 90% of market niches.
That's what Microsoft is afraid of: the democratization of computing. Everyone must have access to the law; that is what the corrupt fear. In the same way, everyone must have access to software and information; that is what the software companies and IP cartels fear.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I'm torn on whether to be surprised by this--the Economist has run stories before (there was one last issue on the SCO deal) that seem to be subtly, quietly favoring GNU/Linux.
The part of me that says "I told you so" has been informed by recent experiences with managment/executives in our small business. They LOVE the fact that we run Linux on everything (well, there's a couple of BSD and Windows machines where we need them) and they never hesitate to brag about it to clients. They love feeling ahead of the curve.
The surprised part of me read the article in the WSJ last month (on the SCO thing) that warned the "Linux crunchies" to be wary of SCO's ability to win scummy IP lawsuits. The article betrayed a complete lack of understanding of what the "Open-Source community" is (to the extent that it's anything at all). And the same execs that love having Slackware stickers on everything need to be reminded during every internal licensing audit that GNU/Linux IS free as in beer, too.
They love it, but they don't get it. Makes me a little worried, sometimes, where they'll want to take it.
It was interesting that the various governments are interested in alternatives, in large part, because of the storage of information in proprietory format. This would only be enhanced by the latest proposed MSOffice document format being incompatible with even previous versions. But the best bit, imho is that the article metnions three groups/professions to benefit most from the move to Open Source: " large consultancy firms and systems integrators, such as IBM, which will be called in to devise and install alternative products; firms such as Red Hat or SuSE, which sell Linux-based products and services; and numerous small, local technology firms that can tailor open-source products for governmental users.numerous small, local technology firms that can tailor open-source products for governmental users". Hmm, don't critics of Open Source always say no way to make money from such a 'socialist/communist/root of all evil/hippy' model? And gee, helping small businesses, especially IT based ones, expand, profit, and employ more people, is HIGH on all government wish lists. Great to see an intelligent analysis in a respected magazine, too.
Nothing - well thats something.
Governments want the freedom to set their own technology course, not be dependent upon a proprietary software company that is beholden first of all to its shareholders. Governments want the security of knowing precisely what their machines are running on, by checking the code themselves. Governments want the abililty to set their own upgrade schedule, not wait until a company tells them the new version is ready. Governments want the ability to squash bugs immediately, not just when a company decides that bug is worth fixing instead of just adding new features.
Microsoft is so focused on winning the bottom line that they don't seem to have caught on to the biggest appeal of FOSS: Not free as in cost, but free as in speech. It's a principle that individuals find appealing, and now governments are finding that this freedom works for them as well. So no matter what Microsoft does, they can never compete on those terms. It's a principle now. Game over.
An understanding of customer needs.
Exactly why governments are gravitating towards open-source, according to the article. They can tailour the code to suit their needs, instead of expressing thier needs to a company and then waiting for the product.
"Politicians in India have called on its vast army of programmers to develop open-source products for the same reasons."
All you MS developers are safe now. There'll be no outsourcing there any more.
hmm... I question your 90% number. Proprietary software tends to drive focus where the money is. OSS tends to drive focus where the work is interesting.
So while OSS continues to make great inroads in the OS space, for example (lots of interesting work there), it's hard to picture a loose collection of programmers building a serious contender to SAP or PeopleSoft's product set. They're not interesting enough projects to inspire passion in peoples' free time, at least not the the necessary degree. And there's a LOT of money/effort spent on this dull sort of software.
And I don't necessarily think that's important. Consider that ESR is driven by ideology: the chief benefits of computing should be available to everyone, regardless of thier ability to pay. That means operating systems and desktop applications, the web browser in particular. It means a great web server, a selection of good-to-great databases etc, all via OSS. It means everything important to the operation of the internet, which must never be owned by a corporation.
There will be plenty of niches still best filled by proprietary applications, and I think that's okay.
Random musings of the very tired...
of a head's up to anyone who hasn't read the headlines on Slashdot, CNet, or google for the last 18 months or so.
I think what's more telling is that it is sitting there in the Economist. Now you just have to wait for it to show up in Business Week as an editorial piece, and then It Must Be True, at least to managerial types of various calibers.
The Economist has this characterization of being for people who have their finger on the pulse of things; who are levelheaded and are already in the know, so it may sort of be preaching to the choir. It's pretty spin free, so that awkward quote from the Microsoft rep "being customer-focused" sort of stands out, and I think that was intentional.
Microsoft doesn't customer-focus unless you're entering a partnership agreement with them. Otherwise your wants and needs are averaged out across the board and shipped in a Service Pack. Meanwhile the article puts that quote agaisnt the backdrop of how open-source is being chosen precisely because it's easy to tailor for what you need.
And you don't have to be a slashdotter to appreciate that irony. It's all right there.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
The same will be true of Microsoft... the more they attack open source software, they will undermine their own monopoly. This could end up causing a huge draw towards open source. Just like the RIAA they could have chose to embrace new technology (and ways of thinking), Microsoft could have embraced open source. Given grants to developers and kept their own business alive by forever by making good interfaces to those programs (after all, it's what they're good at). But instead, like the RIAA, they chose to go on the offensive and in the end it will kill their business if they don't change.
So I say, bring it on Microsoft! You're only ensuring that in the future, with those tactics, Open Source will dominate the computer world, just like P2P is beginning to dominate the music distribution world.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
It uses every font installed on my computer - whether I boot Linux or Windows. It does them in every size and the printed output looks the same as any other word processor.
.DOC .XLS or whatever format when bringing files to work, or emailing them to people.
Yes, there are deficiencies. It doesn't have a database or email/calendar programme. I'm not sure what I would use for the former but I know they are debating it in their mailing lists. For email/calendar there is Mozilla. That's not perfect either, but it's the only browser I use.
I recently gave a copy to a nurse at work who wanted MS office but was not going to pay that sort of price. I installed OOO on her laptop and she took it home. The only verbal assistance I gave was a reminder to save things to
I asked how it was going after a couple of weeks. The reply was "it just works".
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
One of the items that often gets ignored in Microsoft's thinking is this: They were a small company with many competitors and Operating Systems were many and varied and had their niche; MS has changed the world by the proliferation of its operating system(s) and made it part of the INFRASTRUCTURE on which society relies. Once you control the infrastructure, you can't behave like MS currently is behaving - or the people and Governments will look for alternatives.
They changed the world, but unfortunately, they can't change themselves and herein lies the biggest of their problems.
The last statement in the article "But the signs are that many of them have already made up their minds." is very telling. Once you have known MS's past behavior, you know why they made up their minds.
> Lets not forget the biggest problem with open source software. It directly relates to the high unemployment rate currently being experienced in the tech sector. Programmers by the millions are unemployed because communists are undermining the great American capitalist economy by GIVING their software away. How do you expect to get work as a programmer when some guy next door is giving away the software for free? It's outright piracy and should be banned in the United States.
The problem with your fantasy is that if not for FOSS the world market would have almost completely converged on Microsoft products by now, and there wouldn't be any programming jobs anyway unless you happened to land a job with Microsoft.
And it's not like they'd need a lot of programmers once the competition was completely crushed, either.
[Actually there will always be a need for people to program up special-purpose systems that can't be bought off the shelf or downloaded for the net, and those jobs will be there whether FOSS is available for free or not.]
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I wish the zealots would at least concede that much before blasting the horrible , horrible, evil, closed, proprietary software.
Um, are you missing the definition of the word "zealot"? By definition, zealots on either side of the issue will concede nothing! To misquite The Princess Bride, "I don't think that word means what you think it means."
Sadly, I think it's human nature to look for a panacea. We never learn. There IS no panacea. (And all absolute statements are wrong.) I tend to advise people to be pragmatic in their zealotry. It's a good think I like to hear myself talk, because zealots don't like listen....
Eddie the Penguin (as I'm known at work)
Microsoft and its allies have sought to discredit open-source software, likening its challenge of proprietary ownership to communism and suggesting that its openness makes it insecure and therefore vulnerable to terrorism.
More strikingly, Microsoft has been imitating the ways of the open-source "community". Last year, the firm launched a "shared source" initiative that allows certain approved governments and large corporate clients to gain access to most of the Windows software code, though not to modify it. This is intended, in part, to assuage the fears of foreign governments that Windows might contain secret security backdoors.
So, they're saying that the openness of the code makes it less secure and vulnerable to terrorism, while at the same time opening their source to prove that it isn't secure... If they willingly admit that open code can be verified as more secure, how can they accuse Open Source software as being inherently less secure because it is open? And how come nobody calls them on that?
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
The Brazilian government plans to migrate from
Windows to Linux 80% of all computers in state institutions and state-owned
businesses, informed the daily newspaper "Valor". This will be a gradual
migration, that will begin with a pilot project in one ministry and which will
be completed over a period of three years, according to official sources cited
by the financial daily.
The goal of the migration is to save money by finding alternatives to
expensive proprietary licenses. Highlighting the gradual phase-in approach
that the Brazilian government has adopted, Sergio Amadeu de Silveira, the
president of the National Institute of Information Technology, stated that "We
are not just going to do a hasty migration". He proceeded to say that "our
main concern is the security and the trust of our citizens. The biggest
resistance to any change comes from the existing cultural inertia".
The government, De Silveira explained, created two weeks ago the "Chamber for
the Implementation of Software Libre" to pave the way for the upcoming
migration.
A small part of the 2,095 million reals (about USD $700 million) that the
Brazilian government budgeted for information technology spending goes to
Microsoft, owner of the Windows OS. The government's decision to adopt Linux,
according to De Silveira, will boost the popularity of the operating system
among businesses and consumers. Moreover, it will foster the production of
local software and "democratize access to knowledge", said De Silveira.
"What is good for the country is good for General Motors, and what's good for General Motors is good for the country." -- Former GM President Charles Erwin Wilson, 1952.
Wilson later became Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense (1953-57). Sometimes a good quotation gets in the way of good history.
Microsoft thinks open source is anti-competitive? That's certainly not the case. There are multiple vendors of Linux, including big players like IBM, Novell, Redhat, SGI, Sun, and SuSE. And there are multitudes of small players. And if Linux isn't the best for you, there are other fully interoperable alternatives such as FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD that are open source, and still more like AIX and Solaris, that are proprietary. Looks like plenty of competition to me.
The problem is Microsoft doesn't want to be in a posititon of having to choose between losing sales or losing a lock on customers. Even if Microsoft were to have been an early adopter of Linux, they would never be able to gain a total market domination in it. And they know this. Microsoft's big fear is having to scale back to what a competitive market really means.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's obviously a good thing that governments are mandating the use of OSS. Thus, OSS must be superior. Consider, for example, some technologies that the US government has mandated:
- Ada over all other programming languages
- ISO OSI protocols over the TCP/IP suite
- Interlaced HDTV
An official government stamp of approval on Linux can only be viewed as evidence that it's the best technical solution available.
Programmers by the millions are unemployed because communists are undermining the great American capitalist economy by GIVING their software away. How do you expect to get work as a programmer when some guy next door is giving away the software for free? It's outright piracy and should be banned in the United States.
Wow. So it's Open Source that's causing the extinction of the Great American Programmer? Working at a company which is oursourcing coding to another country on the different side of a large ocean, I don't know that Open Source even registers on the radar as to why people are out of work. Please.
And communist? You completely miss the whole business model of open source. And you seem to be under the impression that open source is something recent, when in fact it is as old as programming, the only difference is that now non-programmers are talking about it. Not to mention that name calling is the last argument of those who have no real argument.
Besides, this "Great American Capitalist economy" is being weakened by a government that not only encourages wage deflation in the tech sector, but is actively participating is the process.
But that's OK. You can blame open source if you just want to be angry and have something to rant about that doesn't require much thought or investigation.
Last I checked there were plenty of people working on completely closed proprietary software projects that are not owned by Microsoft. Microsoft really doesn't complete in THAT many markets, only the ones where you need billions of copies of the software. There are lots of less common pieces of software that MS has no interest in.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Microsoft would not exist in the way that it does without a particular type of government granted monopoly called - copyright. It is not like other property rights which have natural limits in supply and demand, it is an atrificial one where Microsoft controlls all the supply. It is not true to free market philosophy any more than slavery was in the 1850's. Yeah they bought and sold those slaves like commodities, yeah the economic strength of the plantation system rested on slavery, yeah the business men who ran it were universally considered educated and ethical - and just doing normal honest business - but it was all bullshit. Slavery had to go, it had always been a burden and was always far more about controll rather than property - but as society entered the industrial age our society could no longer bear the social restrictions allowed by slavery.
Well now we are entering into the information age, and copyrights are looking far more like an untenable and eternally unenforcable restriction every day and less like a property right every day. They are not about property, commerce, freedom, or markets - but controll, and so is Microsoft and the other's like them such as the RIAA who have held themselves accountable to the same forces.
As much as an advocate as I am for open source software, and a supporter of free software though not an outright fanatic about it, I have mixed feelings about the mandating of open source in government or any other area.
The problem with mandates like this is that it, in a way, sanctions monopoly. Monopoly by open source/free software may not sound like such a bad thing, but I personally have a bad reaction to anything that presents a choice as my only choice.
Example: There are forms of pornography that I find particularly repulsive (not talking obviously illegal stuff like pedophilia, but just things between consenting adults that would make my hair curl looking at it). However, that doesn't give me the right to mandate that YOU can't look at it. Moreover, if someone on high decreed "you can no longer look at this", I would fight it. Even though I have no intention of looking at this stuff, I made that choice, not someone else, and I would fight for the continued right to make that choice.
I use open source software almost exclusively. My desktop runs Linux. My wife made the choice to try Linux and now runs it exclusively on her laptop. But that's our choice, not someone else's mandate. Yes, I would love to see the whole world go open source. But it has to happen by choice, not by mandate.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Yes, Microsoft is just another vendor
.doc and . ppt file. Maybe MS Office will have a chance in the future.
But In order to provide what government need, it need to be open standard, allow government to switch to other product easier later.
If Microsoft will provide the open standard format of
hmm... I question your 90% number. Proprietary software tends to drive focus where the money is. OSS tends to drive focus where the work is interesting.
Who says development of free software has to be free? Money can potentially be made developing open source software, as long as the source code is then distributed under open source license terms.
Say a government which has mandated OSS needs a certain application written for which there is not existing project. They pay someone to write it, and release it to the open source community. Or, ventures between governments could split the cost and share the results.
Although governments will mention many reasons for using Linux or *BSD, I think one of the primary drivers will be security. I'm not talking about security in terms of viruses or trojans, but about national security.
Let's face it. Most governments don't trust each other as far as they can throw the Statue of Liberty. Even allied countries spy upon each other. So, you know it must scare the hell out of most countries to get a large part of their critical computer infrastructure from a company in foreign country. Especially when they can't even see the source code. I know that if Microsoft was located in Europe that the US government would worry about this. I have no idea whether anyone has ever tampered with Windows code for spying. But you know the paranoid security agencies in most countries will worry about this. And nothing that Microsoft can say will stop them from worrying about this. Even if Microsoft gave them the source code and they built their own Windows code, the compiler could be altered to secretly add malicious code. One of the Turing award lectures (I think it was Ken Thompson) talked about such bugging of compilers.
Of course, using a free operation system will bring other benefits. And from a public relations standpoint, those are the reasons they will admit publically. But let's face it. A lot of this comes down to national security concerns. Even if the various governments don't admit it.
According to the article, IDC said total government software expenditure worldwide was $17b, but Microsoft's share was only 2.8b. What other software are they buying?
My Blog
And, BTW, doing it at the best price.
So, there is absolutely no contradiction in the mission of a government making mandatory OSS for its administration and the price tag. Making OSS a requirement is not necessarily related to the sole price consideration. As the example of Munich is showing us.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Plus, we'd be indirectly supporting the effort of another, possibly communist country.
Shit, so much for using Linux. Damned scandanavian socialist pinko bastards are just taking over the world. First they gave us reliable celluar phones, then reliable OS kernels. If we don't stop them, they might bring us other scourges like affordable healthcare and pensions. They must be stopped.
Next thing you know will be trading with China. Oh, wait... In other news, the Senate just voted to allow Americans to travel to Cuba. The red hordes are coming. Trust no one.
MS happens to be one of the largest advertizers on the economist.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
These are principles:
Every citizen has a right to utilize and benefit from electronic government services from the privacy of their own homes, without having to agree to an invasive and limiting EULA to acquire a "license", which can be revoked at the whim of a private corporation. The software tools which realize this right must be understandable, reliable, secure, auditable, and accessible.
Every citizen has a legitimate expectation to access to the wealth of enabling information available electronically, for education, for health, for justice, to better themselves and help to provide a better future for their children and their children's children, in the privacy of their own homes. This access must not be only on the whim of a private corporation on the string of an invasive and limiting EULA. The software tools which realize this access must be understandable, reliable, secure, auditable, and accessible.
The list goes on...
We, through our government, have an obligation to, as we are able, fund the realization of these rights and legitimate expectations of our fellow citizens through the development, distribution, and deployment of Free Open Source Software.
No longer must private entities be permitted to benefit from holding back -- monopolizing -- that right and legitimate expectation possessed by every modern person to better himself or herself, and his or her children through the increase and greater securing of knowledge, education, privacy, skill, and generally acecess to those services and goods each funds with his or her hard earned tax dollars, in this age of great information.
There is no longer any excuse.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
This reasoning is fatally flawed.
Since the shared source system does not allow any organization which is given access to the source to see the *ENTIRE* codebase, nor does it grant priviledge to modify the codebase (which implies, in turn, that one cannot recompile it for their own system), how can any person outside MS realistically even tell that the source code that Microsoft has provided actually directly corresponds to the operating system running on that particular personal computer?
The answer is that they can't. And frankly, if a company was going to be deceptive enough to put back doors into their software in the first place, you can bet your privates they'd be deceptive enough to lie about what their source code was.
I'm not saying that Microsoft has actually done this, but they are pretending that this "shared source" system makes them look accountable, and it really doesn't.
At least their reasoning for making the CE source available is more plausable.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
there are many areas
There are a few areas were there exists a propiatary solution that is superior to any OSS solution.
where proprietary products are still far superior
Name any closed source package that is far superior to all OSS equvilents. Can't, do it. Why? 'cause there are none.
Quote from the article: Jason Matusow, Microsoft's shared-source manager, says that developing software requires leadership and an understanding of customer needs?both areas where proprietary-software companies excel.
This is one of the factors that ensure that Microsoft will ultimately lose the battle against open source: in many cases, the developer is the customer, and in every case the customer can become the developer. No proprietary-software company can win against this. Why is it that otherwise very smart people can spout nonsense like this as soon as they work for Microsoft. To a lesser extent it happens with Oracle, Sun or IBM, but it seems to me that critical faculties disappear very quickly once somebody is in the belly of the Beast of Redmond.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
It's interesting to see the US being backed into positions by the rest of the world. Like foreign governments latching on to open source. Makes it glaringly obvious that our recalcitrance is a thinly veiled concession to corporate interests. That would make open source software doubly inviting overseas. In one move they can hit back at the US and Microsoft. Pretty tempting just for the value of the political statement, technology justifications aside.
We really are our own worst enemy sometimes. I really hope we can heal the rift some day. We'll get a chance at a good start in Nov. '04, but it's going to be a long road.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
it's hard to picture a loose collection of programmers building a serious contender to SAP or PeopleSoft's product set.
GNUE will be a serious contender in about 2-3 years. At that point, SAP, Oracle, MS, and PeopleSoft/JDEdwards will be charging large prices for their stuff (like they are not already). GNUE will have enough time behind it to get all the core pieces in place and dissatisfied customers from the above will start backing it like Linux is today.
OSS is a very serious contender in nearly all aspect. Most of it is simply in the process of being developed.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You dont understand the basic idea behind these goverments shift. They are going after Free/Open source softwares not just because they find it as the "best tool for the job". Instead many of them being democratic governments are going after TRANSEPRANCY and ACCOUNTABILITY. Proprietery software are not transperant inherently. Nobody knows what is there inside (may be spyware , backdoors... anything could be there). Any government which belives its actions should be transperant to the public can't use proprietory software for that reason alone. And this is the main reason why "zealots" demand for mandatory free software usage in government.
http://www.nasirudheen.blogspot/
I disagree, at least for small databases that are OLTP in nature. Postgress and MySQL both have duplicated all the relevant featurs of Sybase/Oracle/DB2, and at a fraction of the cost in systems - let along license fees.
I am guessing that just as Linux has eaten the low end sales of HP-UX, Solaris, Irix, classic AIX, and Digital UNIX systems - MySQL and Postgress will much on the soft underbelly of database software (OLTP servers with 4 database engines or fewer that have database footprints of less than 100GB).
Scaleability, and a few decision support features are all that are left and this "battle" will have been won, and the only Oracle can do is a holding action much like IBM Mainframes have done against desktop computers.