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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."
Does this Anonymous Coward has any studies done that show going towards Open document is a burden to tax payers? I can make a same clain without doing any studies. In the short term it may involve new costs but I think in the long term, it makes cheaper for not having to pay for commercial software licenses. This may be a benefit to the tax payers. How's that?
FTfoxA: "Worse, the policy represents an attack on market-based competition, which in turn will hurt innovation."
Yeah, open standards hurt innovation. You know, it's not like groups like ANSI exist to try to re-standardize fractured languages with open standards that have evolved quickly and represent what the people who are using the language want. But hey, it's not like any language with an open standard ever caught on (C, C++, LISP, Ruby, etc.)
But you know, FOX most likely says that evolution is evil too. At least, as far as the public (schools) are involved...
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Hey you so called (politically) conservative geeks - here's a pretty blatant attempt by Fox news to pass of an industry slug as a journalist. Now think about Fox news doing that with the Israel/Palestine issue, covering any American Democrat, or any other international affair.
In short, wake up - Fox "news" is feeding you B.S.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Before everybody goes crazy about the Fox News article, consider the source. American for Tech Leadership is a what it amounts to a PAC for different tech companies. Guess who is one of their major contibutors??
You guessed it, Microsoft.
http://www.techleadership.org/about/
So don't act all surprised when you see what amounts to a Microsoft spokesperson saying that Open Source formats are going to "cost too much" or "take too much effort". Fox News should be ashamed to run this "ad" as a news story; but when I come to think of it, everybody else does it too.
pudding, so they say, and this type of FUD is proof (or close enough) for the State of Mass. to know that they are doing exactly the right thing. Despite the fact that it makes me giddy to see the MS machinations squeeling like stuck pigs, I think this sort of FUD, and the resultant outcries are just the thing that will slowly turn the world to look at F/OSS. This, I believe, is due to the fact that if F/OSS wasn't worth looking at, wasn't a threat to the juggernaut that is MS, then there would not be this outlandish FUD going on.
While I feel sad that such pains must be endured, I'm glad to see the MS machine slowing down, losing some ground, and perhaps looking a bit pale in the face.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
the great thing about having an uncommon name like Ms Strzalkowski quoted in the article, is that a quick Google search for Strzalkowski and Microsoft reveals a certain Tomek Strzalkowski who appears to be friendly with the Beast. I wonder if they know each other?
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
No where in the FOXNews.com article did James Prendergast list a specific complain against what OpenDocument doesn't have to offer. He has some quotes about how "[Open Office Calc] 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" and how "Microsoft keeps expanding into XML and metadata and OpenDocument may have trouble keeping up." If you read the article, you get this feeling this guy is a frothing, super-capitalist munchdog who really rates communism. Those FASCISTS!
Seriously though, my take is that "open" standards foster competition but can supress innovation when they are unable to grow and adapt. I'm not familiar enough with OpenDocument to really comment, but I do wonder how it stacks up, feature and architecture-wise against say WordOffice/PDF. Is OpenDocument really that far away from XML and metadata? Seriously...
That's not what I meant.
From http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=America ns_for_Technology_Leadership
Americans for Technology Leadership was founded by Jonathan Zuck in 1999 as a "grassroots" organisations for concerned consumers who want less regulation in the technology sector. It also campaigns on general tech issues such as spam.
It has been frequently described as a Microsoft front group.
ATL's domain name, techleadership.org, is registered to the Association for Competitive Technology. The site is hosted by Thomas E. Stock and Thomas J. Synhorst's LLC, TSE Enterprises. Synhorst is a founding member of the DCI Group, a Washington DC-based strategic consulting and lobbying firm which has counted Microsoft as a prime client for a number of years.
I live in Malaysia, and have followed this debate for a while.
"Our views as represented by Pikom, are that the government should not dictate which development model--OSS or commercial--should be the preference for procurement," said Peter Moore, Microsoft's general manager for public policy, Asia-Pacific and Greater China.
As you can see from the evidence here, the voice that's being heard "through Pikom" is actually Microsoft's.
If the government chooses to move to an OSS operating system like Linux, Microsoft loses control over us. Malaysian application software developers actually have nothing to fear, because the govt is not going to lock out closed-source. It'll just have a preference for OSS programs if it fulfills the same function as a closed-sourced one. Meaning, locally developed custom apps are always going to be better-suited to the customer (the government), open or closed source. However, if Linux or FreeBSD got around to being the standard underlying operating system, Microsoft and its cronies would lose out big time, as it would lose it's control (but we would get our sovereignity, so who cares about Microsoft).
Microsoft clearly sees OSS as a competitive threat, otherwise they would not be sponsoring shill groups to defend them. I wouldn't say Microsoft is going down the tubes quite yet, but people are starting to look for alternatives. Their anti-open-source FUD is starting to work against them rather than for them.
I'm a Massachusetts taxpayer, and I am quite pleased to see my tax dollars going to fund something which will be quite useful down the road. The cost is trivial compared to what was lost through the Big Dig cronyism. Priorities, people!
Rather than asking "Is it a good idea to use an open file format not supported by our current software (Microsoft)?" they should be asking "Why don't Microsoft programs support an open file format?"
Microsoft's not stupid. They'll respond the obvious way - by providing a slightly broken support for the Open File Format. Of course, this will get private businessmen and civil servents using MS-Office to generate and handle Open File Format documents and getting confused about what's going on. The MS-perverted standard rapidly becomes the defacto standard, and the world returns to normal... except that the public once again blames the no-good liberal massholes of taxacheussettes for committing the unChristian crime of trying to interfere with the free market.
Not quite. It's to make it easier to insure that they can continue to do so, regardless of any future idiocy by any one vendor. Naming no names, of course....
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I really love that they are supporting this measure at the government level. It seems to me (and I haven't seen anything really covering this angle) that it is a very smart thing to do - it forces commercial software to compete at being better than anything else available for the task, rather than just being what is known. By having a mandate of looking to OSS first, it raises awareness that it is even an option.
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
(The Beatles)
I think you twisted the definition of free market to suit your own preferences. Free market is a business concept, while open format is purely a technical one. A free market should allow businesses to compete based on their own choices instead of forcing them to adopt just one choice. Microsoft thinks using their closed format enable them to compete better. A free market should allow Microsoft to compete based on their believes and let the open format win on the open market through consumers' choosing open format products instead of government regulation.
It would be trivial. It wouldn't even have to be done by Microsoft; someone else could probably spend a weekend extracting the MS Office conversion support from OpenOffice.org and setting up a VB script to call it. Really, somebody ought to do that, just to mock Microsoft's claims. It would really mess up Microsoft's PR at this point if Massachusetts solicited a bid for an unmodified Office deployment for the contracts that Microsoft is claiming to be unfairly excluded from (with the Massachusetts handling the OpenDocument requirement itself).
AKA professional astroturf. See here.
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