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Massachusetts Adopts Open Standards Strategy
prostoalex writes "The state of Massachusetts at a meeting of state information officers adopted a broad-based strategy to move to open standards. The strategy does involve Linux among other open standard solutions, while moving away from Microsoft-based platforms is one of the decisions. State Administration and Finance Secretary Eric Kriss insisted that decision was made on technical grounds and had nothing to do with antitrust investigation of Microsoft by the state of Massachusetts."
Interesting that the article focuses on the "cost" issue of Linux while skirting the inherent problems with soverenty and transparency that proprietary software poses to governmental institutions.
I have really been thinking about getting much more involved in linux (and BSD, etc.) consulting lately, but there hasn't (isn't?) a huge demand in my area. People are generally more concerned about being able to open Word documents without a problem etc.... and feel it is worth it to them to pay the MS tax.
This comes as great news to me (not because I live in Mass.) because it is paving the road for a lot more job opportunities to open up - which in my opinion is a mutually beneficial thing for the government and the populous.
Reducing the cost of IT is always a good thing, even for the wealthiest states.
If you can save money on IT, maybe you can redirect it to health care or education or better unemployment benefits or debt reduction or even (*gasp*) lower taxes.
By using free, open standards, they are able to choose the best tool for the job, whether that be open source or closed source.
Instead, consider the antitrust investigation conducted by state officials as "The Education of the Great State of Massachussetts" in all matters of Microsoft business practices.
They have some learning under their belts, and it shows.
If there is a job that an Indian programmer can do significantly cheaper than an American programmer (total cost factored in, not just wages), then PLEASE let the Indian do it and sell the product to me for less.
I am an American consumer who believes in free enterprise. If you can't produce a product at a competitive price, on the WORLD MARKET, tough crap for you.
I see no reason why I should be forced to pay higher prices for a product just so a computer programmer can keep his job. Just like I don't see any reason why we should hand out tens of thousands of dollars to farmers because they can't grow food at a cost that allows them to sell for a profit.
Agricultural subsidy, trade tarrif, import restriction, whatever you want to call it, what it REALLY is is a tax on consumers to support inefficient production. If it can be imported for less, we should import it, and spend the extra money on the stuff only Americans can do.
I'd wager money that 95% of the computer programmers and farmers and automobile assembly line workers who bitch and moan about their jobs being filled by foreigners and robots are the first people to buy the cheapest item they can at Wal Mart. Because Americans are selfish, greedy bastards - they expect everyone else to pay higher prices to support their inflated wages, but they won't pay more for products that support other American's inflated wages.
And of course, that will never work. Either everyone pays higher prices to support inflated American wages and while starving foreigners produce nothing and spend all their time contemplating how to blow up our skyscrapers, or we import what's cheaper to import and we all get more stuff for the same price. Why leave an Indian doing nothing when we can get an Indian to work for us and only pay him half of what he's producing is worth?
paintball
The idea of an open standard is an open interface (file format, API, etc.) that allows sw for various vendors to interoperate. This way you don't even need to see the source to write complementary or competing sw, you just need the spec.
I think it takes a little more than that. Win32 and the Excel functions are open standards by that definition, but that's not a huge help to the Wine and Gnumeric projects, who have had to do some reverse engineering to make sure their software conforms to the API as implemented by Windows and Excel where that implementation differs from or is a superset of the APIs as published by Microsoft. Even if Microsoft published absolutely everything and followed all it's own specs, they would still leave other vendors at a perpetual disadvantage, because Microsoft gets to see their own APIs and write software which uses them from the most preliminary design phase, whereas other vendors have to wait until Microsoft makes those APIs public, after enjoying a headstart of it's own choosing. For example, Excel has been cloned adequately, but AFAIK the closest thing to an independent Windows API implementation is Wine, which is now 10 years old and still in need of work.
From an economic standpoint, it's important not just that everyone has access to the standard, but that everyone has the same access. From a practical standpoint it's important not just that multiple conforming implementations are theoretically possible but that multiple conforming implementations (or at least free conforming implementations) actually exist.
Whats the one in Peru? Did I miss an OSS development?
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Yeah, probably only one of the most profound and eloquently worded reasonings to ever come from the mouth of government.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/2515
I am glad others are noting the difference between open standards and open source. Currently there is a significant segment of businesses working in the "commoditization market" for open standards. Here are some I can think of off the top of my head:
- Red Hat Linux
- MacOS X (sort of, since it's based off BSD)
- XML based content management systems
- Microsoft Office 2003 (hehehehe... well they do support some XML output but it's not all that open either)
I believe that many organizations are still leery of implementing open source systems for fear that it's "too complicated" or there is no guarantee of service for them. Red Hat is certainly making good off of this very concept, and I'm sure many other companies are following suit.
Is this a good thing? Probably, at the very least in the short run. I'm glad there are some projects that remain pretty easy to use/install and are entirely free (i.e. Mozilla) but other technologies aren't quite there yet, and that's okay.
For example, a content management system is probably tough to make into a "simple" product. There are many open technologies to aid in building dynamic web sites but they take a significant amount of customization. Consulting companies or even 3rd party vendors of software pitch in by trying to make the process easier to take on.
(wow... this is my first post on slashdot. Hope this was ok reading for some...)
I suppose that you can find for me a copy of our 1960 Journey to work survey. It was last seen on an 200 BPI even parity tape. (10.5 inch, reel to reel). The media was so common that we assumed we'd always be able to read it (until we sort of forgot about it). We'd periodically scan the tape to make sure it was still readable, and otherwise ignore it. Come the day we need it, and none of our vendors have a tape drive that will read 200 BPI even parity. Out tape verifier still says it's good, but we can't read it. Well, there's some outfit in (was it Chicago?) that can read it, probably, but they want more than is in the budget for the project. It's an obsolete project, so it doesn't get a line item on the budget. More time passes, and the tape verifier dies. This doesn't matter much. Nobody is using those files anyway (big surprise, since we can't read them anymore). Now we don't even know whether it's good or not, but we've backed the newer stuff up to microfiche. That'll certainly be good forever. You can even read it with a magnifier if you must... more time passes. Now you'd better be willing to read it with a magnifier, because the microfiche readers have all been replaced with other things.
I actually left out most of the intermediate forms. And every time one of them died, it took with it records that weren't important at the time the change was happening.
Guys, this is not good. The formats I'm talking about here have all been open formats, and just by people not paying attention to something that wasn't important at the time, data was irretrievably lost. There are no more copies of the Journey to work data. There are no more copies of the processed & edited for local job counts 1960 Census. They became unreadable. There probably aren't any more predictions made in 1980 to 2000 for what the travel trips would be and where people would be living, and how long commutes would take. But without that, the current models can't be validated. (Not that they would be..it's a differnt group running the models now.)
This is a report on what happened in just one small government agency. We don't yet have a count on how badly the shift to proprietary file formats is going to hurt us, because up until a decade ago we had the ability to move important data from system to system with only the need to write conversion programs. And we still lost a bunch of the data. With the switch to proprietary formats we may see a data loss approaching 100%.
That's one way to keep us from learning the lessons of the past.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The big thing is that the users of software are in the best position to notice what could be improved, and with OS and some programming skill they can do something about it. They can also cooperate with others in similar offices, and develop a "distro" that can be an evolving standard suite of applications for such offices.
And the cost can be divided amongst all instead of multiplied.
And if apps are done as real open source projects, hosted say at sourceforge or at some cs.xxx.edu site, there could be opportunity for software development courses to have some lab problems that have real-world requirements.
Consultants and companies could of course also be hired to move development along when there's a need that can't wait for the appropriate MA employee, or high school geek wanting bragging rights, to become available.
Seems like a no-brainer for state offices that are virtually clone operations.