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The Open Source Dilemma for Governments
Sam Hiser writes "Tom Adelstein, open source consultant and Member of the Open Government Interoperability Project ("OGIP") working group, offers another incisive article in which he discusses the costs in the terms of lives and dollars when local governments do not deploy open standards-based software for data sharing. Asks Adelstein, 'Can local governments afford to create redundant applications to meet new Federal standards for first responder alerts, emergency services, law enforcement, broadcasters?' He posits that Open Source collaborative initiatives may provide the only solution for the US if the people want to create a safer environment."
I don't care if the US Senate or House chooses to use MS Office or vi or whatever - as long as the documents they produce are of an open format (text, rtf, XML, whatever), and can be read by us Citizens (and others, why not?) wihtout needing to have a particular piece of software. Same can be said of exchanging data between various levels, types, and branches of government.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
For pure niche apps (patrol car suspect lookups, etc), I would posit that small commercial companies are in the best possible position to provide support and apps, not the FOSS world - after all, where does your teenage A-Patchy Webserver hacker get his hands on the specialty hardware used in patrol cars?
by the UK goverment that they might "look-in" to open source software themselves simply because they know it scares Microsoft, like Germany, who got massive discounts.
/. stories on goverments considering OSS and then stories a few months later about them receiving massive discounts.
A goverment just has to say it's thinking about it to get Microsoft scared and giving out vouchers left right and centre.
Expect to see alot more
--- any post that takes longer than 20 seconds to write, isn't worth writing
1)"Free" is not a good motivator - coming in under budget is not a motivator if they want budget they need to spend budget
2) it's too complex for SLG admins, it's not as easy to pass an open source torch on to your new team mate or underling.
what will motivate Open Sopurce Adoption?
those 400k novell seats and their admins that still run win9x and office 97 need an upgrade very badly. If Novell/SUSe and Ximian can pull off a compelling solution then you will see huga adoptions -- not these onsie twosie deals.
Mod me down if you like but this is a strong emerging market.
Sorry you need to update your version of Microsoft Office to 2003sp3 in order to report a child missing.
When timing is critical a commercial solution can fall flat on it's face.
As seen on Wired: Get a free desktop PC
If we want secure software, it has to be open source.. Granted, at the start the code quality of open source stuff is around equal to closed source stuff but the resources available to check code that is public are far larger than any closed source firm can muster.
Potential resources mean nothing. Open source code that no-one bothers to read isn't going to get better on it's own.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"So as more people use open source, the bigger target it becomes to hackers."
Care to tell me why that Apache is so much more secure then IIS?
Apache is the most popular web server in the world. But IIS has the most flaws....
> > So as more people use open source, the bigger target it becomes to hackers.
> Care to tell me why that Apache is so much more secure then IIS? Apache is the most popular web server in the world. But IIS has the most flaws....
Because Apache was written to serve Web pages and IIS was written to make somebody rich(er).
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Open Source systems (bazaar) are often much more stable than commercial systems (cathedral) just because of the number of bug hunters, and when it comes to military apps, stability is absolutely crucial. Would you really want your military systems to blue screen or dump core right in the middle of a firefight?
Conversely, would you want all your image recognition algorithms (for TV guided missiles), your IR decoy rejection routines, your frequency hopping timings to be known to all and sundry, including the adversary?
"Look, {insert your favorite rebel army leader here]...here's the code for how the missile rejects the decoy flares. Now we can work around that." "ooohhh, and here's the Predator communications frequencies. We can start on spoofing those."
There are much worse ways that software can fail. One of the worst is software that looks like it's working, but in fact is not displaying new / updated items -- this leaves the warfighter with the false impression of situational awareness. Another popular failure is software that has time-consuming processing steps that don't have adequate progress indicators -- this leaves the warfighter wondering 'Is it done yet?' when it hangs or fails.
At least with a blue screen or core dump, you know you've got a problem, and you can restart / reboot to resume, with a well known startup time.
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
I agree with the parent.
In many cases, the way that government works is that the budget-busters will wnd up getting more funding (despite being called to make cuts and everything). This is especially true if you're facing "essential" government expenditures such as the military (notorious for paying $100 for toilet seats and such). It would simply be too difficult for any politician to justify slashing funds to a military at its budgetary "capacity", especially these days, and this is why the Army is giving Microsoft huge and (in my opinion) bloated contracts, so that when they need fighter jets or nukes they can say, "See we're operating at capacity, and you can't seriously *not* give us funding, right?"
It's the first trick in the bureaucratic hnadbook: spending money makes you look busy so that you can get more money and look even busier. Government agencies are like parasites that just consume as much as they can and continue to consume more (not that we don't need these agencies, per se).
This is why a giant surplus was effectively erased by Bush as a result of a substantial wealthy-heavy tax cut and exorbitant funding on this corporate-sponsored war effort.
Call it my paranoia. But in a word, open source would be great for our (and any government), but open source isn't precisely what governments want. I think they are looking more for the happy median where they can still break the bank a bit, without becoming too bloated. It's like walking the fine line between losing funding for not spending enough (and having unused cash in your account) and getting cut for spending too much (and looking bad and calling into question how "necessary" certain things are).
Which is why it is ideal (and why we see very often "looking into" open source but contracting a discounted Microsoft deal.
the problem lies not government "per se" but with the management thereof.
The same government that you are railing about is the reason nobody's dying in low speed head-on crashes from getting a steering column rammed through their chest.
The car companies were quoting "market forces" and "nobody will want to pay for collapsible steering columns," and people were pinned to their seats like butterflies to cardboard. Sound familiar? Its the justification of every elite to anything that's going to cut into sl/easy profit.
Management of government by objectives without citizen input into what the objectives are is disastrous.
Remember Clinton's medical plan fiasco that was thrown out, not by elected representatives like the congress, but by HMO lobby groups posing as experts, as being unmanagable.
You didn't get to register so much as a peep for or against or make a suggestion. It was managed right out of your hands.
People are dying because their only sin is being temporarily broke from the last scrape with the health care system.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
The article is also about paying for the software ONE time and using it everywhere, instead of paying for EACH copy of it everywhere it is or might be used.
That does not necessarily require Open Source, but Open Source is much more likely to make this possible than current proprietary commercial solutions.
Instead of paying a license to use each copy of the software, you pay someone to write the software, and you pay someone (not necessarily the same person!) to support the software.
Eventually, we'll probably end up with a federally funded department that writes and/or supports these applications. Local governments can use them for free and get support as needed (maybe with a small fee?). If a local government wants something that does not already exist they can pay to have it created (so that department isn't flooded with unnecessary requests), then others can obtain it for free. It would be a lot cheaper than everyone paying for licenses to use commercial software, and would directly affect our taxes.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
I wonder why all this commercial propaganda on slashdot recently?
There are 6,000,000,000 people in the world. It is a statistical certainty that a significant fraction of these will have both the means and the motivation to work on any commonly used piece of software, if it is accessible. ie. open source. Please remove your paid commercial blinkers.
---
User friendly M$Windows/XP.
User unfriendly M$Windows/XP license.
Quoting from http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/ 85676
You may not be counting, but there are about a dozen active perl 5
developers on p5p, about half with commit rights. Similarly parrot has
about 5 active committers.
This is the number of competent volunteers that a well established 16-year
old programming language used by many individuals and many organisations
can muster. From the entire world.
Now tell me, when was the last time *you* actually downloaded some open source software, and instead of using it (a home user really has no user for custom government software designed to sort peoples tax returns or other similar jobs) you went through the code line per line looking for bugs.
Assuming you somehow got past question one by fudging the truth (i.e. you downloaded something OS for personal use, and seeing a "source" directory you spent 2 minutes randomly opening files for fun), when was the last time you actually identified a bug, and submitted it (20 bonus points if you actually produced a patch yourself)
Simply put, even with several million people world wide who have the equipment and skills (most of that 6 billion lives in poverty, and most of those rich enough to own computers usually don't even understand the concept of right click), there are not enough willing to give up their time to do code reviews, especially on a piece of software they personally will never use and will never care about.
To perhaps better highlight the flaw in your logic, shouldn't litter be non-existant? With 6 billion people on the planet there should be more than enough willing to volunteer their time to go out to parks and streets they don't ever visit and pickup trash. The reality of course is that even the people who use those streets almost never think to pick up a piece of litter.
Unfortunately, THIS is one of the leading causes I've found of govt. computer problems. They start with a flawed data model, and man, I've seen some doozys!!! But, it gets cobbled together to 'work'. Then, it becomes the standard..and more things are hooked to it...also kludged to work..and systems kludged to work with those systems...ad nauseum.
I know its tough, but, if you can get the data model created correctly to replace the old one...would be the best way to go if caught early, to prevent the potentially coming mess of spaghetti code...
Of course, if you can talk them into creating a new system from scratch...with a proper data model, and open standards..better for the govt., and a long term bit of work for you!!!
So few people understand this...if you get the data model right...most everything else will fall into place, but, I see so often, this cornerstone to good computing put together by someone who just never seems to have had any training in relational theory...at least since RDBMSes still predominate the scene for now...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"Anyhow, this article is a lot of FUD. I write software for local governments, and at least in this state (which is one of the richest in the US), OSS wouldn't save any money nor eliminate any problems."
That's a strong statement. I'd say that there is more FUD in your post than in the original article. Maybe you forget that a lot of Slashdotters are, or have been government workers too...
'"Code Security" is not a big problem in local government -- as local governments generally only use their digital systems to warehouse and process publically available information. These guys keep paper records going back to the 18th century, and if anything seems out of the ordinary they check the paper.'
I worked at a federal agency that had everything stored on paper too. One day they decided to double check some things and found out the off-site storage facility they had been paying for years had no idea where most of their documents were. Those that could be found were water damaged beyond being readable.
So much for using paper as a back-up mechanism. I think part of the point of the article is that local governments do things on-the-cheap and that if they all shared more of their systems the systems would likely improve for everyone, even the smallest local agencies.
"And if asked, we readily turn over our code to local auditors. Very rarely do we do this. Nobody cares about anything except getting the software to cut down on their workload."
Sam here. But they never ask. Thats the problem. They don't know if contractors are sticking to standard coding practices, they don't know if third party "shareware" components have snuck into their systems (and they have) and they don't get involved with these issues until something breaks, and by then it's probably too late. More eyes on the code solves this too. Worst case, after the same breakage occurs for one local shop, other local shops will at least be aware that there is a problem that needs to be addressed (and most of them will only have to apply the fix, not invent it).
"And that's the biggest problem in this market: accountability. Small companys come in, install software, and then disappear."
Right, small companies like yours, supplying one of a kind mixtures of COTS software and local code. You most likely have a long term contract where you are because you have wired a dependence on your institutional knowledge into your systems. Good for you, not good for taxpayers.
"Can you imagine the accountability headaches associated with asking a "community" to write custom tax logic? "
Again, you seem to have missed the point, which was that there is not all that much variation from one location to another. The types of variation caused by different tax rates etc. should not be buried in code logic anyway, but should be in parameter control files and be alterable at a fairly high level.
"Don't get me wrong...I like the idea of getting more eyes on my code...but I can't imagine injecting community code into a hectic development schedule like we maintain."
Well, from what you have said, it most likely wouldn't be your code getting examined. Most likely in fact you would adapt code written at a larger, richer locality to your needs.
"My boss would surely never go for it. Of course, I don't expect many of the OSS acolytes to agree with me...some people don't seem to understand that the minimum wage people working without possibility of overtime at the county clerk's office don't want to visit the newsgroups for help when they have bugs preventing their license software from printing."
Both you, and your boss probably won't go for it until you see other similar localities going for it successfully. At the federal level almost everyone looks to other agencies for guidance. With no agency in a clear leadership position you end up with the same thing you get in any leaderless organizations, n