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U.S. Governments Advised to Use Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "LinuxDevices is reporting that non-profit public policy research group, Committee for Economic Development, has released a 72-page report that takes a look at open standards, open source software, and 'open innovation.' From the article: 'The report concludes that openness should be promoted as a matter of public policy, in order to foster innovation and economic growth in the U.S. and world economies.' The full text [PDF] of the report is also available for download from the CED site."
From LinuxDevices' summary: And directly from the report (boldface mine): It's fortunate that LinuxDevices included a link to the PDF so we could read it in its entirity (plus, although the report is 72 pages long, only 44 of those pages are the actual report).
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Because the clueless people in control need a stack of official-looking paper full of things they don't understand in order to reassure themselves and others that some non-clueless people think it's a good idea.
Really, all these "studies" could be filled with nothing but Pink Floyd lyrics after the first few pages, and nobody would ever notice.
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What I find curious, amazing, confounding is this whole thing seems to be full circle for what I remember the government doing a LONG time ago! And, it is and was one of the fundamental original underpinnings of some of the Microsoft shenanigans in the early 1990s.
I worked on some government contracts circa 1985, and I remember a movement in the government contracting to require new contracts for computer services to be POSIX compliant. I also remember thinking how cool of an approach that was, especially considering it was a government initiative. Anyway, lots of fun programming, lots of fun (and hard) work and all on a Unix (SunOS) platform... yeah, it was even fun though we were using SunView (look it up).
Enter Microsoft, late 1980s, and 1990 on. They sorely wanted to get into the big government contract business, and as one of their boasts for their new and improved OS (NT), they talked loud and long about NT being a POSIX OS (not an OS with a POSIX subsystem, a POSIX OS). Heck they even convinced me to come work for them for a while, until in a closed door presentation, the project manager for the POSIX subsystem prefaced her notes by saying (and I'm paraphrasing, but it's close to a quote), "Before we start, I just want to point out that we don't care about this subsystem, we don't intend to use it, and we don't intend to support it. It's just a check-box for government contracts."
And, now the government is back to recommending Open Source and "open innovation". I only wonder if this has any impact on Microsoft this time. It didn't before, I'm guessing it won't now. Sigh.
"The same software that hackers around the world can get the full source code for and start picking through it to find vuneralbilities."
I have a big clue stick if you want to beat yourself on the head with it. Is this a knee-jerk reaction you're having? I don't know where to begin to comment on such a lack of knowlege on this subject... sigh. But lets just say the report is more about open standards and interoperability than about using F/OSS applications and operating systems.
From LinuxDevices.com: The report was released by the Committee for Economic Development (CED), a non-profit, non-partisan public policy research organization comprised of about 200 senior corporate executives and university leaders.
This isn't government waste -- this is a public group trying to advise the government. Of course, being non-partisan, the Demopublicans and Republicrats in Congress won't pay attention.
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I believe the PDF standard is open in that you can implement it in your software without paying royalties to Adobe.
One of the problems with the Gov. switching over to Open Source is cost. You would have to convert all current documents, stop any process that is currently going on, and then you have training. MS Office is the office suite for the U.S. Gov, and they get such a good deal that it is more cost effective to stay with them. They also have a program that lets Gov. employees purchase Office 2003 Pro for $20 and Windows XP Pro for $60.
We are encourged to use Open Source where applicable, such as Linux for certain servers, Plone for content management, etc.
Yes and no. Yes, it uses PDF for which there are open standards (ISO 15930 and ISO 19005 to name only a couple). No, that's not much like RTF, for which there is not (TTBOMK) an open standard. After Microsoft releases a new version of Word, they (at least usually) publish a specification of the format of RTF files it'll produce -- but that's not much like an open standard process where other interested parties have input into what the spec will look like (like the ISO standards mentioned above).
In fairness, the ISO standards above primarily specify subsets of the PDF format as defined by Adobe, and they use Adobe's specs as normative references, so the difference isn't as clear-cut as it would be in some cases. OTOH, at most this puts PDF alongside RTF -- I certainly can't see any way the RTF spec could be considered any more open, and generally I'd say it's less so.
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