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South Korea Jumps To Open Source Software
mormop writes "Following on from the news that a far-eastern Linux distro is on the way, silicon.com is carrying news that South Korea is switching $300,000,000 worth of PCs to Open Source Software.
The only question now is will Steve Ballmer be capable of covering the sort of distance needed to pull back all these switching governments before collapsing with exhaustion, or is he en route for the Air Miles record?"
The amount of savings is not the same as the worth of the PCs.
"Last month, Japan, China and South Korea met in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh to sign an agreement to jointly research and develop non-Windows, open source OS."
Wouldn't it be great if state governments (yes, I'm fixated on state governments because I work for one but also because it is the public's money that is being spent) here in the US would do the same thing? I've seen individual states start various research projects but no larger effort that leverages all the resources in all states.
Tangent: my graduate thesis is going to be on why governments should have an open source technology preferential mandate given the cost-savings and total ownership provided by doing so. Call me crazy but I really believe that government should always choose the least expensive option whenever possibe. Currently, you ask for funding for a project and once you get it the rule is use it or lose it, thus, more money is spent than is really necessary for most projects in order to keep the funding for future years.
- tokengeekgrrl
One thing that companies outside the US (Germany, China, South Korea, South American nations, etc) is that employing Microsoft is really only good for Microsoft.
But by switching to Open Source for the government, there are several benefits that "trickle down":
1. Programmers within the specified nations are now employed, which keeps money inside the country.
2. The advances that come from Open Source software can be then used in businesses inside the country, which reduces there expenses, and if more development/administration is needed, they can look inside their own country rather than going elsewhere.
3. Exportability. If you have a country with top engineers in Open Source, and another country happens to need those, you are now in a better position to export those services.
I'm not quite with the "governments should make laws forcing Open Source down people's throats", but I am in support of measures that will give them control over their own software destiny.
Granted - as long as they play by the rules of the GPL, BSD, and other licenses.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
S Korea may just be using this as a threat to get MS to negotiate on price and/or features. Until recently, govts (and large companies) haven't really had much of a credible alternative to Windows, so they haven't been able to use their incredible scale as purchasing and negotiating power. I wouldn't be surprised to see MS and S Korea come to a deal in six months time...
or camels nose under the tent, whatever way you want to explain it, this is very cool. Something I just realized, if enough governments or corporate arenas move to open source software, inertia will help us bring down Microsoft because they will have to create there software to interoperate. If they don't, their current customers will not be able to communicate as effectively with our open source bretheren. The tables will have turned. The tables are turning. Thats very cool.
http://www.haxwell.org
...distros build colloboratively by the IT departments from various state governments.
I realize it would most likely have to occur on departmental levels, for example, I work for the courts and develop case management systems so I would work with the IT departments of other courts in other states.
The current system in place for some of my appellate courts are based on a system that was developed by a vendor for a different state but since it's proprietary to the vendor, we can't enhance it so we have to re-write it so that we own the code and can make changes as needed. Imagine if we could create a baseline application for all the courts in the state and leverage all the programmers in those IT departments to work on it? Ok, so maybe it's just my fantasy.
- tokengeekgrrl
I have used Open-Source Software (OSS) instead of Commericial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) applications recently
First of all, COTS and OSS are orthagonal concepts. Is Red Hat COTS or OSS in your view?
Second I _hope_ you don't just download something off the net and call it a day! Free/Open requires commercial support just like non-Free/Open software.
The difference between Free and non-Free is the licensing model and the lack of "use" and "copy" restrictions. By making a dichotomy between "commercial" and "open" instead of "commercial" and "non-commercial", and "open" and "proprietary", you're creating distinctions that don't exist.
Imagine if lots of people decided to work on auto assembly lines in the spare time; what would that do to the gainful employment for auto workers?
Bad analogy: it is impossible to sustain an auto industry by volounteers. I might be willing to fix my own car, but I have no desire to waste time fixing someone else's too. However, if I can fix my car and instantly distribute the "fix" to millions of other cars, I might do that.
A better analogy, maybe: imagine that every time you had to put gas in your car, you had to pay somebody to do it. And you always had to buy a full tank, even if you weren't empty yet. And you had to buy a new set of tires. Then an "open-service" station comes along where you can pump it yourself, and it's cheaper. Sure, there are some benefits missing, and you might get your suit dirty, but it's a lot more flexible and it's cheaper.
In that case should you feel sorry for the "closed-service" gas pumper? Hell no, he was a waste in the economy. Time to retrain!
Basically I'm saying that if jobs are lost and prices come down in the software industry, it's because they were *charging too much* in the first place. I don't feel sorry for dead weight.
The India thing is another story, which probably has to do more with America's great wealth (labor is more expensive, etc) than anything else. In time this will fix itself. I compete with my Indian competitors by doing a much better job than they do. However I'm not above using their services for "grunt work".
Also, there are other forces at work: limiting OSS to protect jobs also yields great power to the closed-source software companies. It sure makes me nervous to think that my bank records, my medical history, my legal history, my credit history, my bank account, my entire life is stored across the country on computers mostly using software from one company. That's just a little creepy.
Since there is only so much money to go around to fund IT infrastructure/application development, an integral part of my dept's mandate is to be cost-effective in order to be fair to all users across the state (which is a significant group since I'm in CA).
;)
In light of that clarification, I don't think your comparison to US mail or paved roads or education or my deciding which candy bar to buy (twixt is my current favorite) is really applicable.
- tokengeekgrrl
Who said it had to be OSS? Locking yourself into ANY one vendor is nuts. I can remember back when business owners couldn't be bothered to learn how to use a computer themselves and would rather have an assistant do all that "techno stuff" for them. I now know quite a few of them that are out of jobs and cannot get a job because they are suddenly lack experience in crucial areas. The world of technology is a lot bigger than just one company no matter how big that company is. Tying yourself to any one company is just a bad business mistake. Keeping your options open is the smarter move. As for OSS, I seriously doubt it is going to just disappear if one person stops using it. That is contrary to the way the system works. Not to mention all of the big companies that are supporting it. To me, I would rather use software that is supported by MULTIPLE very large companies rather than roll the dice with one company who continues to get themselves in more and more trouble. But hey, its all just opinion. Enjoy your comfy box, I don't think I would feel as comfortable trusting MS.
seSales, Point of Sale software for OS X.
Jobs aren't lost due to foreign outsourcing, they are simply moved from one country to another country which arguably needs them more.
Clearly, jobs are lost due to OSS. Jobs are lost due to all programming, and due to all automatization. After all, it is the very point of technical progress that machines do the work that otherwise humans would have to do. Obviously, the better we make our machines (and programs), the more jobs will be lost.
Fact Check. The conspiratory project with the Chinese appears to be development of Linux and other open source, not to create a new OS. Your reference clearly states that the project will be open source, and claims that it will be based upon Linux.
The arguments that OSS causes a loss in job suffers from the same flaw as /. arguments that technology causes a loss of jobs and outsourcing causes a loss in jobs: looking at a particular piece of the economy rather than looking at the economy in the aggregate.
Innovative endeavor is never a bad thing. OSS and motorized street sweepers both cost jobs for someone. But society as a whole is able to be more productive, and more jobs are created. Similarly free trade leads companies to move jobs abroad, but it also makes American businesses possible that would previously have been unprofitable and makes consumer good more attainable. Imagine how expensive products would be and how difficult it would be to run a computer store or a car dealership or a toy factory if all the parts were 4-20x as expensive.
OSS, technology, and free trade really suck for some people. Real people lose real jobs. This is particularly hard on people losing low skill jobs, which are the most likely to be lost due to technology or globalization
The answer isn't stopping innovation (I consider outsourcing a market/resource management innovation). The answer is making sure that there are systems in place that help the people who lose out due to innovation to get the skills to take advantage of the new jobs that are created by innovation.
Thought provoking but (respectfully) incorrect thinking:
The COTS guys who "lost" their job because a competing Open Source package was found to be any one or more of
1) cheaper
2) easier to deploy/maintain
3) architecturally superior
4) unencumbered by an unknown future pricing structure
5) -fill in another OSS advantage here-
lost their jobs for the correct reason, this is what happens in a free competitive economy.
Additionally if they've been clinging to their old model, while ignoring the changes in the software world since around 1994, they deserve the hard lesson.
May I point out that in a free economy, the inventive ones can create jobs.
I would like to think that for every proprietary software job "lost" that the OSS world might gain the expertise of yet one more soul.
It's easy to blame this situation on the software. Mistake. What's hard to create is superlative customer commitment and high-level professional services. It centers around the human interaction, not the tools -- successful people are always making money by helping their customers succeed with new and better tools/methodologies.
Your point would seem to make sense, except Microsoft is just as likely to decide that a product does not make them enough money, and discontinue it. When they do that, you have no recourse. If you were using OSS then you can hire your own guy to maintain or improve it. If your using open formats, then you could just switch programs an not think twice about it.
Examples: ListBot IE for Mac Windows 98/NT
So, having said that, doesn't it make sense that the government should mandate open formats so that they're protected from the OSS coder losing his broadband and MS locking them in? If MS Office really does the job the best, then they should not be afraid to use an open documented format. This goes for any product.