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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.
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 $$$.
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... :-)
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