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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."
They probably are unbiased, however this couldn't have hurt. There is a reasonable amount of pressure to support Corporate America, and make a biased decision in favour of an American-made product. Antitrust certainly helps open the doors to other discussions.
Without degrading the discussion into an OSS/Proprietary religious war, I don't think the issue is the money/cost as much is the openess. Remember governments get to tax companies, so money for companies == money for govt. I don't know if MS has an office in massachusetts or what, but I'm just thinking about the issue in general here. Basically I see two advantages to open source or at least free as in speech software for goverment use: 1) you don't require recpients of data to use a particular companies software (ie word documents), therefore opening up competition and allowing different branches of goverment to communicate without forcing a particular software choice on any of them. and 2) closed source software is basically a "black box"... if there is a bug or security hole it isn't possible to figure it out/fix it. Being a scientist, I have seen #2 bite a few people in the ass on ocassion. There's a certain proprietary data analysis package which had a least squares line fitting routine with a nasty bug -- it gave completely wrong results... but since the source to the routine was closed, people were forced to find other solutions (and no warranty on those high licensing fees either...). Anyway, we all know the drill here: in summary, I think it is definitely in the interest of the government to promote software openness in general.
As an IT professional, I do see that Open Source solutions do in fact save money in the longer term. Five years ago my organization was using mostly closed-source products... and our software budget was several thousand dollars per developer per year.
Today my IT development organization is virtually 100% open source. We're running Linux on the desktop and use open source development tools. Our software costs have dramatically fallen. Nope, we don't even use MS-Exchange or MS-Office.
If we extend this to the average user's desktop (versus just developers), we could see an even greater savings. And yes, we're working on it.
Saving money is always a good thing. Again, even the wealthiest of states, such as Massachusetts, need to save money given the very bad state of the US economy.
Other states may want to investigate this strategy in order to save $$$.
DRM and Treacherous Computing mean that "dealing with vendors going bust" might become that much more difficult. Some people are responding with "well, the government will just make sure the vendor never dies by propping them up." There's a name for that, coined by Mussolini in the 20th century - Fascism, the partnership of government and enterprise. Anyone who thinks it's a good idea deserves the hell they get.
The existence of Linux, and perhaps more importantly in the long run, OpenCores,(open source for computer hardware), means that people have an alternative to fascism.
POSIX, to which Linux partially adheres, is a formal, de jure standard for an operating system. Windows, by it's prevalance and the varied implementations (9x & NT families), is sort of a de facto standard, but I'm stretching my definition there just because I can't think of a more solid example.
C, C++, and SQL are examples of formally specified languages, each with a detailed ISO description of what a language calling itself "C" or "C++" has to be compliant with.
Python is a de facto standard language, because there are several implementations that provide the same interface (the original C based Python, the later Java based Jython, and experimental variants such as stackless Python). Although there isn't a formal description of what a "Python" language has to be like, there is the original reference implementation that the other variants strive to adhere to.
Perl is not a standard language, because there is to date only one implementation, and there is no formal description of the language. This is changing with the Perl6 effort, with a formal description of the new version preceding the actual implementation effort, allowing for the possibility of future, formal implementations as well. As a side effect, to maintain backward compatibility there is going to be support for Perl5 on top of the Perl6 runtime engine -- at that point, Perl5 will be promoted to a "standard" language, but until that happens, the term can't be applied.
The situation with Perl most closely resembles the situation with Linux, in my opinion. Just as Perl is mainly defined by what Larry Wall has wanted it to be, Linux is mostly defined by what Linus Torvalds wants Linux to be -- and the fact that many people contribute to the evolution of the language doesn't change the fact that the major effort has been essentially driven by one individual in each case.
Now you're right that, "standard" or not, Linux is unquestionably open. But you start out by asserting that Linux is "by definition" a standard, and it seems to me that this suggests a lack of understanding of both the definition for & examples of de facto or de jure standards -- because Linux, open as it is, just doesn't fit either of those definitions. It's open, sure. It's flexible, of course. But it's not a standard. It just isn't. To argue otherwise is just ignorant, and causes the rest of your [otherwise sound] argument to seem less strong than it should be.
Moral: don't say "$foo is, by definition, $bar", unless "$bar" really is defined as "$foo". If you build up your argument around such an easily falsifiable point, your whole argument can collapse :-)
<rant />
Future rants: Slashddot posters that begin their comments with "I have to {agree,disagree}." No, they don't -- you all have free will and some stranger's Slashdot commannd should never be enough to compel you to do anything. Man that phrase is a pet peeve of mine... :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I work in a fairly small 'shop'. 4 IT people in the whole place- 1 does desktop support/plays games, 1 is the manager, 1 talks to our field offices all day long about networking issues, and I'm a programmer- I also administer the servers.
I'm not a 'real' sys admin, and I really wasn't hired for it- I was hired as a programmer. I try to keep the sys admin work to a bare minimum.
With that background- I really LIKE using a GUI. If there are settings on the server that I very rarely change, it is easy for me to poke around, look at little pictures, and figure my way through windows (or Windows, take your pick). I've got 8 servers that all perform different functions- so replicating tasks isn't important to me. I don't do anything often enough that I would be able to remember how to use the command line.
And, I *like* pretty install packages- they make my life easier, and let me get back to my real job- programming.
There are a lot of people out there, in jobs similar to mine. We don't all work in situations where efficiency of large tasks is paramount- but ease of use for many different small tasks. A GUI is perfect for us.
No reason to lie.
However it's taken 4 generations of windows operating systems (depending on how you count) to make things buisness-friendly as they are in NT/XP
Okay, I've been a system administrator, network engineer, ISP webmaster, security administrator, C programmer and, most recently, a security officer. The height of Microsoft's "business friendliness" was the Win95/NT 4 combination, and that was really on "friendly" to the small/medium business market. Today, with the advent of weekly patch cycles, proprietary document format lockin, Software Assurance, continuous virus/worm threats, lack of appropriate security in the software, and more I would hardly characterize Microsoft as "business friendly". They are universally used because they are a monopoly with a stranglehold on the PC and desktop software market. As for ease of use, Mac has always been easier to use, as was OS/2. Windows didn't win on the desktop because it was better, it won because Microsoft used the VHS vs. Beta approach. DOS and Windows cost less and had more software available for it, and it was ubiquitious as more and more hardware vendors took advantage of OEM pricing.
Unfortunately, most Microsoft based organizations that try to migrate to F/OSS will implement things in the way you are discussing, where the user can "get under the hood". If you deployed Unix (Linux is just another incarnation of Unix) appropriately, with the OS and apps residing on a server and the users connecting via smart terminals this becomes a non-problem. The terminal session is set up to deliver the GUI and apps the user needs to do their job. For office automation workers this makes perfect sense and is extremely efficient from a resource, dollars and cents and people perspective. For more information, read the portion of this article that deals with how Unix in a distributed environment is set up see this story.
There was also recent /. coverage of this approach. Of course most Microsoft shops will try to migrate to Unix in a way that will allow "tinkering under the hood" and all sorts of issues. However, one of my colleagues implemented a Unix/thin client solution in a large data center. Not only did it cost about 60% of a PC solution, but the desktop support dropped to nearly zero. The sys admins, network admins and engineers don't have the lost productivity involved in updating, maintaining and patching desktop PC's. Their "workstation" has the resiliency of a server and they can connect to their desktop from anywhere and have the exact settings they want every time.
But, unfortunately, your scenario is probably more likely after all. Guys who have grown up with the concept of stand alone Windows PC's will try to clone that with Unix/Linux.
In my universe I'm perfectly normal, it's not my fault you don't live in my universe.
My small business (not to be posted here for fear of being /.ed :) caters to other small business with low cost linux server solutions and out-sourced IT Services. Unlike other states where I have lived... there is actually a very strong market here.