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Open Source In Public Sector Meeting Opposition
Open Source movements have been gaining popularity everywhere, but not everyone is happy about that. Johans wrote to mention a ZDNet Asia story discussing a controversy within the Malaysian computer industry over the government's 'Public Sector Open Source Software Masterplan. From the article: " ... the government has stated that its first choice in IT procurement are infocomm technology solutions developed on the open-source platform. It states that 'in situations where advantages and disadvantages of open-source software (OSS) and proprietary software are equal, preference shall be given to OSS' ... However, some industry consortiums have stepped out to voice their concerns over this policy." Meanwhile, Anonymous Coward wrote to mention a Fox News article entitled 'Massachusetts Should Close Down OpenDocument', calling the attention of journalists to the 'huge mistake' that Massachusetts is making by switching to OpenDocument. From that article: "Officials in the state have proposed a new policy that mandates that every state technology system use only applications designed around OpenDocument file formats. Such a policy might seem like something that should concern only a small group of technology professionals, but in fact the implications are staggering and far-reaching. The policy promises to burden taxpayers with new costs and to disrupt how state agencies interact with citizens, businesses and organizations."
Isn't that the main point of an open format document? To make it easier for the involved parties to interact!
[alk]
"We can't figure out how we can make money from this move, It must be bad for every one, and by everyone we mean us."
Of course microssoft and friends are upset, office is there big cash cow, and if Mass pulls this off and saves some money, then there is every possibility more states will follow.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
1) Switch to an open file format now and deal with the problems and cost while they're still managable.
2) Lock yourself more tightly into vendor-owned file formats and either keep paying the vendor-tax forever or make a far more troublesome and expensive switch to an open file format later.
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That's the same impression I got when reading this article. For example:
In a letter to Governor Mitt Romney about the policy, Citizens Against Government Waste righlty (sic) pointed out that, "Not only will this mandate undermine free market competition and drive up costs, it will also curtail the ability of the people and government of Massachusetts to benefit from future innovation."
Rightly? I think the issue is far from settled. I'd argue that encouraging the use of a common standard would enable competition, by preventing lock-in to a specific vendor. But hey, there I go refusing to look at things in the same short-sighted way as the reporter...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Free market? Do these people even read their own bullshit any more? The OS marketplace and document 'standard' are owned by one convincted monopolist the current administration let off the hook. What free market? It's a meaningless boogeyman term these nitwits spout nowadays by reflex, much like "save the children" and "burn the witches".
That may have been the most lies and misinformation that I have ever read in one place. Some choice comments:
"In other cases, the OpenDocument solution may cost more and provide less, but agencies and citizens will have to pay the price and make do."
Yup, definatley costs more, being free and all.
"It may be that an array of exceptional, low-cost OpenDocument applications will emerge in the coming years."
*Ahem*... http://www.openoffice.org/
That's about as low-cost as they come.
"Many technology writers, in fact, have cast a skeptical eye on OpenDocument and applications that support the format. George Ou, writing on ZDNet, recently compared the new Open Office Calc product to Microsoft Excel and found it lacking, writing, "[i]f someone from Open Office can explain why it takes more than 100 times longer to create and load spreadsheet documents and why it uses up several more times memory that Microsoft Excel to work with the same data, I'd love to hear it.""
So, OpenOffice Calc isn't as good as Microsoft Excel, and therefore the OpenDocument standard is no good...
One more.
"Until now, Massachusetts' citizens and government agencies have been well served by a competitive, merit-based procurement process for technology services."
And they still could be. He forgets to mention that the OpenDocument format is in fact open and therefore anyone can support it. Microsoft could make a product that competes here just as easily as anyone else (or more easily, considering the money they have to throw around).
I could go on and on. The entire article is horrid, anti-open source propaganda.
Worse, the policy represents an attack on market-based competition, which in turn will hurt innovation. The state has a disaster in the making.
*cough* Excuse me?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
How difficult is it for MS to just add OpenDocument support?
The article mentions ease of interoperability, claiming that everyone should use Microsoft Office since everyone else uses Microsoft Office.
THAT'S NOT INTEROPERABILITY! That's a monopoly! Microsoft is well aware of that fact, too, which is why they DON'T want to support OpenDocument. If they did, then people would be able to choose a different office suite and still be able to maintain working relations with others. Suddenly everyone has choice, and that's a bad thing!
Maybe this is just the spark needed to light a fire under MS's ass. Either they or the state of Massachusetts is going to have to crack, and I'm betting they will. It's trivial to add OpenDocument support to MS Office. Of course, once they do, they'll open the floodgates to personal choice... so maybe they'll bite the bullet and wait out Mass.
Disclaimer: I'm not an anti-MS zealot. I merely go with what is in my opinion the best tool for the job. I run Windows XP, Firefox and OpenOffice.org.
Open Source Software is the free-market response to closed, expensive software. THAT is what the author does not understand.
People keep focussing on the problems with OO.o vrs Office, including a totally irrelevent dig at Calc (that doesn't match my experience - at my last job I downloaded and used Calc to data munge some Excel spreadsheets because Excel would lock up for 5 seconds every time I opened or closed the "find" dialog. Nice)
There's plenty thats just plain wrong, too. PDF *is* an open, documented standard with, as far as I know, no patent issues preventing outside implementations. Notably, non-Adobe PDF implementations don't have to rely on difficult and time consuming reverse engineering to interoperate.
And he claims that, up till now, bidding on technologies has been open and merit based.... but he thinks that they should mandate Office. Right. Thats right from the mothership - "Cross platform means NT *AND* 98!". You can implement any "merit based" technology you want, as long as it Microsoft based.
God. So much lying.
and a lot of bad ones. I am in total support of the free market, but have a government agency standardize on a technology is not limiting free markets, it's simply an organizational decision. Governments have done this for quite some time. They standardize on PCs, or Ethernet, or SQL or any number of other technologies. Mandating that a product do X is ok and doesn't inappropriately limit the market. Arguably this policy decision is being driven by polital and not technical factors, but that is still acceptable.
The author is 100% right on when he raises the concerns of increased costs, major implemention headaches, a reduction in the quality of the products. This is part of a major shift in technology. It's not abnormal. Mass. is gambling on the fact that they're political objectives and strategy to reduce a single vendor tie-in will payoff in the long run with increased competition, and better tools. Gambling is the right word here because they are going to have to pay serious premium to build new tools, integrate those tools, support those tools, and train their people on the new tools without any gaurantee that the market will respond in a significant way to justify the expense. I think in 18 to 24 months we will be hearing about major reductions in the scope of this initiative or a complete abandonment of the policy. The costs are gauranteeed, I don't think the politicians have the stomach to actually run that much risk for that much time for something that most people could care less about (even if there is real value).
Some people seem to be confused. A monopoly is not a free market, in fact it hinders a free market. One of the ways it hinders a free market in software is by adopting closed formats. Therefore forcing open formats promotes the free market, thus fostering innovation. Nothing is preventing Massachusetts from using Microsoft's products once they decided to adopt open formats.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Exactly, if Microsoft wants to compete for government business in Massachusetts they will have to "innovate" and support Opendocument format in Office.
Absolutely no one is stopping them.
This flake is arguing that they're shouldn't be only one document format that government uses because there should be only one document format that the government uses, just not the one they picked.
And hes quoting an article by Citizens Against Government Waste who are also a lobby group with close ties to Microsoft.
They are recyciling each other's crap.
That OpenDocument is NOT OpenOffice.
Sure, OO writes out to that format- but OpenDocument is an open specification that not only all the main FOSS office suites either already support it or are in the final stages of supporting it- and the other Office Suites of mention other than MS Office are in the same situation. MS is the only one that's not on the same page.
Furthermore, for most people's Office suite needs, they do not need MS Office's functionalities. It might be a cherished notion that you need MS Office- but for the large part, most people aren't making dynamic documents, those very documents have absolutely no business whatsoever in Government in the first place, and the very issues that make MS Office documents very problematic in the first place are due to those "advanced features".
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I think the part that threw him off is that the free market created something that's actually free.
That's exactly right. The free market drives prices down to marginal costs. With software, the marginal cost is zero. This causes some people to see socialist conspiracies in the free software movement, when it's actually capitalism doing what it's supposed to.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
"The policy promises to burden taxpayers with new costs and to disrupt how state agencies interact with citizens, businesses and organizations." -- James Prendergast
How terrible!
But what about the poor taxpayers who have paid so much tax that they can't afford to buy the latest version of Microsoft office?
Is mr Prendergast suggesting that an IT Dark Ages is the way forward?
"Worse, the policy represents an attack on market-based competition, which in turn will hurt innovation. The state has a disaster in the making." -- James Prendergast
Competition?
Microsoft has always killed off that and, now that something new has struggled to get its head above the water, Mr Prendergast would like to see new competition killed off?
Innovation?
If it wasn't for the competition that Microsoft faces there would be no innovation - such as the bleak times of Windows 98 (that great and innovative successor of Windows 95).
If Microsoft was to add Open Document support to Microsoft Office there would be no problem. The question is: is Microsoft going to support this or is Microsoft going to attempt to maintain its anti-competitive monopoly?
If it costs so much for people to switch to an alternative there shall never be any competition in the Office Suite area; everybody would be forced to stick with Microsoft's proprietary formats. Is this fair?
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
Your whole argument is based on a false premise: that the average citizen wouldn't be inconvenienced if MA stuck with the current "standard", MS Office. But what about when the state upgrades to the next version of MS Office? Now everyone who wants to read current government documents has to upgrade as well. Even if all that means is downloading the free Doc Reader, how is that any less inconvenient than downloading OpenOffice, or AbiWord, or one of the other free tools that can read and/or write OpenDocument files.
.doc that's barely 10 years old.
Even better; how do you open a document created in MS Office 95? Government documents often need to be kept around for decades, even centuries, and yet MS doesn't even provide a way to open a
The citizens will be inconvenienced either way, that's just a simple, unavoidable fact. But, at least with OpenDocument it won't cost them any money.
Not content to either do what it takes to win fairly or lose gracefully, they instead use the same tactics they accuse Microsoft of and engage in the holy effrontery of the self-righteous.
Sorry, but turn-about IS fair play. And anyway, what makes you say that the FOSS people have engaged in MS tactics? Who did they pay off? What special, one time only discounts did they offer? How many jobs did they threaten to move to another state? Which competing formats did they buy up and strangle?
All I see here is a state government that's actually considering the long-term effects of their IT policy, and making a perfectly rational decision. Perhaps you'd like to try and convince me otherwise?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.