eGovOS 3 Announced

A reader writes:"German Minister Otto Schily and at least 2 other ministers will be keynoting at EGOVOS 3: Open Standards and Libre Software in Government conference in Paris, France on November 24-26, 2003. EGOVOS 3 will bring together the largest number ever of high level government officials working in Open Source and Free Software. In addition to the national ministers, 15 senior politicians, government IT officials and representatives from the European Commission, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama and the US will being making presentations." You will find general registration is open - free, but limited seating. Additionally, press registration is open as well. I normally don't post many conference announcements, but this one should have significant impact on governmental decisions around Free/Libre/Open/Whatever Software.

Comments

Open goverment from the people who know...

[MosesJones]

Previous sponsors of EGOVOS have included UNDP, the World Bank, IBM, Oracle, Sun, Red Hat, and Dell as well as government associations and universities.

Remember folks, when people talk about Open Software and standards they are not talking about employing a bunch of bearded hackers with l33t Linux skills. They are talking about hiring the big boys, who in many ways just happen to be supporting this movement because it fits their business and selling models.

This is great to see, but lets not pretend that it isn't the big boys who are making sure the goverments play with Open Source toys.

Politic

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you think the Germans and French would be so concerned about "Free" software if Microsoft were a German or French company? This is pure politics folks, nothing to be proud about here.

Open Standards

[ultraw]

I hope they put quite some stress and effort in the "open standard" parts. I don't care which software is being used. The government will have a good reason why they take it (and I hope this reason is a mixture of cost, support, easy to use, scalability, lifetime,...). If it possible using Open Source, why not. If a product and support from a company are better, sorry, but you have to be reasonable (and that is MY tax money they are using :)).

As long as the documents and data that are stored in the systems are stored in an easy accessible format, and not some closed standard, I'm a happy person. If the government want to switch software, they should be able to do so with little problems.

Also, it's quite disturbing to notice (again and again) that you can download all the documents you need do something administrative, but find out that it is in the latest crappy MS DOC format which is unreadable/badly formatted by my word processor... I even got auto-reply mail with only a doc file attached.

Re:Open Standards

[ultraw]

Well, if the software is build (designed, programmed, tested, debugged,...) by the government, with the aid of tax-money, then YES! OPEN SOFTWARE! NOW!. It was my money that made it happen...

If they just take a part of the tax-money (which was intended for the running of the government) and go out and buy some licenses to make them do their job better/faster/..., then it should not necessarly be open source software. If possible, they should give preference to open software, and to software made in the country/EU (support local economy, like that, tax money is re-entering the economic system of the country/region).

Re:Open Standards

[Koos Baster]

>support local economy, like that, tax money is re-entering the economic system of the country/region

I agree. However, a EU company is not forced (luckily) to invest the money it collects from IP into the EU or -- for that matter -- invest into innovation at all. If the company never "owned" the source code in the first place, a second company can pick up innovation where the first left off. This will benefit the product, make governments less reliable on a single vendor and benefit itself, its citizens as well as the rest of the world.

More importantly, governments will sponsor the innovation process rather than the end result of innovation.

--
If pro is the opposite of con, what is the opposite of progress?

You get it wrong...

[imsabbel]

Politicans dont have any opinion on software patents here in Germany. But there is high unemployment and the (mostly american) software companies are making claims that software patens will help economy, create jobs, enlarge you penis,... (you get the idea).

So Politicians are in a situation where press and opposition grabs these claims and claim they arent doing anything against recession.

Until now, most simply choose to support the patents because they heard only voices supporting them. But the latest protest seem to have changed some opinions.

Re:Government involvement is a double edged sword

[Gallenod]

On the other hand, "the government," at least as it has been involved previously in software development, was the original purveyor of "free software." Everything produced by the government that isn't classified is part of the public domain, freely available for use by everyone. Unfortunately, it has been available without any protection against being co-opted by proprietary interests, resulting in a lot of government code being buried in commercial products and never seeing free use again.

Maybe this is a chance for open source advocates within government to start embedding licenses like BSD or GPL in the software they produce. This is one of the chief threats to Microsoft and their brethren: that the free software they've been profiting from will no longer be their own private gravy train. Yeah, a lot of it gets produced because MS is willing to "partner" with government to develop systems on the public's dime. But others with a more open bent will step up and be willing to do the work.

Some good can come of this conference, even if it only plants the seed of openess in the government software development environment.

Re:Advance only so far, then come to a speeding ha

[gerddie]

Authorities need systems that can do things like council tax, sundry debtor tracking, payroll, personnel, ...
I'm not working in your field, but I expect that the software authorities need is so specialized, that it is usually developed on demand (I assume, most software is developed on demand or in house, anyway). Therefore, it would be possible for a government, to pay developers to develop the software under a free license. It's just a matter of how the request for software development is formulated. Unfortunately, we were taught for a long time, that software comes without source. Maybe such conference helps to open the eyes of some authorities that it is possible that a free software license can be made a requirement, if new software is developed on demand.

Re:Advance only so far, then come to a speeding ha

[Mikkeles]

'Do a search for 'government' on SourceForge and you get back less than four active projects, mostly unsuitable for Europe. I know, I've looked. Authorities need systems that can do things like council tax, sundry debtor tracking, payroll, personnel, time recording, electoral registration, development control, building control, licensing, contract administration, GIS, records management, benefits claims, cost of works, invoicing, BACS, asset management, inventory management, ....'

I agree that there is a definite lack of business orientation in (most of) the open source community. Most of these applications, however, are not available as shrinkwrapware from the proprietory software sector either. They are almost always constructed from the ground up by a service house to meet a specific set of requirements. After all, only the German government needs a tax tracking system that incorporates their rules and laws. Even something that appears as straightforward as an invoicing system usually has enough backend interconnections so as to make most of it special case.

Great, Err, Sort of

[4of12]

In addition to the national ministers, 15 senior politicians, government IT officials and representatives from the European Commission, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama and the US will being making presentations.

I like the sentiment of people coming together to agree upon free standards, free software.

But another side of me remains skeptical that such a large group of politicians can form a meaningful consensus in finite time.

Oh well, there's still probably some value in high level governmental IT people publicly expression support for this or that good free software feature. It will make it easier for their worker bees to openly justify that FOSS prototype project instead of hiding it in a dark corner of the server room.