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."

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[Anonymous Coward]

BOSTON (AP) - Massachusetts, the lone holdout state still suing Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) for antitrust violations, will become the first state to adopt a broad-based strategy of moving its computer systems toward open standards, including Linux, the rival operating system to Microsoft's Windows.

State Administration and Finance Secretary Eric Kriss said Thursday that the decision, adopted at a meeting of state information officers, was made on "technical grounds" and had nothing to do with Attorney General Thomas Reilly's pursuit of Microsoft.

In the technology industry, the term "open standards" refers to nonproprietary software. Microsoft's software is considered "closed" because application developers and other programmers don't have free access to the blueprints.

Kriss said the state's decision was driven by a desire to reduce licensing fees but also "by a philosophy that what the state has is a public good and should be open to all," Kriss told The Associated Press. He characterized the decision as the "most visible concrete action by a state government" to move toward open standards.

A Microsoft spokesman had no immediate comment.

Microsoft is facing increasing challenges from Linux, which has been developed over the past decade by a global community of programmers who share their work on the condition that it be redistributed freely. It has become appealing to cost-conscious companies looking for an inexpensive means to run their servers.

Government agencies from Germany to France to Peru have adopted or are considering Linux-based software as a cheaper alternative to Microsoft products.

cheaper

[dpa]

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.

Re:cheaper

[kfg]

Well, as it happens I originally changed my own business from an all Microsoft shop to an all Linux shop for this very reason. I got tired of chasing MS "standards" which broke my code, made my data inaccessable ( as it were ) without Microsoft products and yes, charged me for fixes for these problems. Not to mention making me largely reliant on MS for core coding even though I'm a vaguely competent coder myself.

The thing is that while I can easily quantify the monetary savings (haven't spent one bloody dime on software since switching to Linux as opposed to several hundred a year for a three computer shop. Ok, I'm not a major player. I happen to think small is beautiful), I can't quantify the real benefits.

Oh, I can enumerate them easily enough, just not quantify.

What is the "quantity" of not having to worry about license compliance? What is the "quantity" of having all my text and data files in plain ASCII so I can access them ( and even Access them if need be ) with any text editor in any computer system? What is the "quantity" of being able to build my own OS from scratch, from source? What is the "quantity" of not having to wait for a "feature" in Word because I can whip up whatever I need in Lisp, Perl, Python or sed? What is the "quantity" of knowing that mutt won't be running arbitrary malicious code attached to email on my system?

In short, what is the "quantity" of freedom, power and control?

American governments, ironically enough, are not geared to think in terms of freedom. They are geared to think in terms of purchase requisitions.

Hence they're most likely to adopt Linux solutions based on cost.

They'll manage to get the rest of it for "free" though. Then they'll start to understand.

KFG

Unbiased? Probably.

[metroid composite]

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.

Surprisingly Logical for mass

[Crashmarik]

Most government bodies have no choice but to move away from closed source, propietary standard solutions. They have an obligation to keep public records available for very long periods of time. (READ CENTURIES). Theres no way they can live with periodic knowledge meltdowns from propietary providers going under or the occasional platform shift.

Microsofts methods of locking your data to their apps will ultimately be seen as intolerable.

Re:Surprisingly Logical for mass

[HiThere]

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.

TP?

[RealBeanDip]

How long before a bunch of open source revolutionaries are seen dumping Windows CD's into the bay?

Open standards != Open source

[phliar]

The reporter unfortunately slanted the story as MS vs Linux. The state says it chose "open standards, including Linux" -- which seems to imply that it's closed standards that are taboo. If they're talking about file formats, network protocols etc. it is of course the sensible thing to do, since you're not vulnerable to losing your documents if the program is no longer supported, and you're not compelling everyone you communicate with to use exactly the same software as you do. Big difference between this and saying that they're only going to use Linux, which makes it seem as though they're retaliating against MS.

Re:Technical decisions...

[ljavelin]

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 $$$.

Think in Lawyer-Speak

[squashed]

OK, so this had nothing to do with the antitrust case w/r/t Microsoft. Take it to mean that it is not a strictly punitive measure taken viz-a-viz the case, which could be problematic in all sorts of ways.

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.

open docs and the mass courts

[Brewst3r]

Even worse than Word, how about publishing stuff in Word Perfect 6.1 format?

author doesn't understand open standards

[geekee]

"In the technology industry, the term "open standards" refers to nonproprietary software. Microsoft's software is considered "closed" because application developers and other programmers don't have free access to the blueprints."

Proprietary software can also adhere to an open standard. 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. Open standard and open source are not synonymous, although the former is a subset of the latter.

Re:author doesn't understand open standards

[roystgnr]

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.

Re:Open souce == Open standards

[babbage]

Sorry, but I'd define a standard as a widely acception set of conventions that is either formally (de jure) or informally (de facto) specified. That doesn't describe Linux.

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... :-)