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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."
The problem is that US legislators are often unduly influenced [bought] by campaign contributions. This will tip the scale. I give you the Sunny Bono Copyright Extention Act of 1996 as evidence.
It's not that governments can't see the benefits, it's that "open source software" as a concept, or various open source companies as a group, can't afford to pay for, or don't want to pay for, the kind of access (lobbyists) necessary to get get this sort of thing done.
Maybe if 'the economy' didn't have to spend thousands upon thousands on Microsoft licences, there would be more money to spend in areas other than Microsoft.
If you are implying that those statements negate each other I don't see it. No where in the second statement is a particular license mandated nor is OSS mandated. Interoperability, on the other hand is mandated. In other words, if Microsoft wants to supply software that is interoperable with other software that a citzen can use, all is well. Now getting Microsoft to interoperate with *anything* is where you might run into trouble :) It seems as though this is exactly the same thing as what Massachusettes is running into with regard to OpenDocument.
Just my 2cents.
I note the digital connections council is headed by someone from IBM and features a number of companies from pro-open source companies and institutions such as universities and Nokia as well as lots of companies that would benefit from open source. If a report came and featured a council comprosed of the equilivant anti-OSS people (ie headed by a microsoft spokesperson) people here would be screaming bloody murder.
No one buys oxygen, either, but the economy seems to be holding up okay despite that. Don't give yourself a migraine worrying about oxygen being free, will you?
Security by obscurity isn't.
If someone wants to find holes, they will. Remember Windows? You know, that system from that tiny company in Redmond. It doesn't really have a rep for being open and disclosed (I heard they even have lost some minor trial in an unimportant part of the world because they couldn't provide enough docs to at least make it possible to create programs sensibly for their system). And still vulnerabilities are found and exploited.
Would more security holes be found if the source was open? Most certainly. The question is, though, who would find them? In closed source, by its very nature, the "white hats" MUST NOT poke. DMCA and its friends prohibit that. Now, since the "black hats", also by their very nature, don't give a rat's rear about the DMCA or any other law for that matter, ONLY them "may" poke at it.
See where it leads?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am not implying that the statements negate each other. I am implying that by incompletely quoting the report (leaving out the key phrase: 'certain critical functions of government'), LinuxDevices encourages the false assumption that the Council is recommending that interoperable technology be mandated for all facets of government, not merely for 'certain critical functions'. That is why I characterized LinuxDevices' summary as 'a tad misleading', rather than 'grossly misleading'.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Less money on software should mean lower taxes or tax money used in other areas. That should be the main argument for open source. There would be other benefits, like avoidance of vender lock-in.
In determining how the government should run itself, fairness is lower on the list. For me at least.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
It doesn't matter how we spend the money, only that it gets spent on something, and as long as that something came from inside the country.
Wow. I can see consumerist education has really taken root. Believe it or not, it is not your public duty to buy more stuff.
Suppose the government spent all of its money paying people to dig holes and fill them back in. It's spending, and its certainly spending within this country, but it clearly isn't good for the economy. Why do you think that is?
Spending doesn't boost an economy. Useful production does. Spending only has a positive effect on the economy to the extend that it promotes useful production. For more information on this, look up Opportunity Costs. Also, if you are concerned about spending money on American goods as opposed to others, may I suggest that you read up on the Ricardian theory of International Trade.
I don't see how using open source would help the economy. In order to boost an economy, people need to buy things, and last time I checked, free open source software was *free*. Free means it doesn't cost money, and if it doesn't cost money, no one is buying it. If enough people switch to free software, the economy will be hurt rather than helped.
This is why Econ-101 is mandatory for most 4 year degrees. Most software is tools. That is to say, most is infrastructure cost for a business or individual. There are a few exceptions, like games where it is an end product. People, companies, and organizations buy tools to accomplish other tasks. Take automobiles, for example. Businesses and individuals use them to get from place to place and to transport things. They are tools. Suppose all of a sudden some buddhist monk has a revelation. Energy and matter exist only in the mind so using this simple technique you can instantly transport yourself and everything you are carrying anywhere you want. *Poof* the world is a very different place. Free transportation takes the world by storm. All the auto companies that don't sell recreational vehicles go under. What a huge loss to the economy right? All those billions aren't being spent building cars and selling cars and buying cars. Hundreds of thousands of auto workers, salesmen, and managers need to find new jobs. Other industries take a huge hit as well, like insurance, gas, and steel. It's a disaster.
But wait, lets think about this just a little bit more. Most of the people in the US still have jobs and now they all have eliminated a huge expense from their budget. They don't have to buy a car, insurance, or gas. What do all these people do with the money? Well, they certainly vacation a lot more, since travel is now so cheap. They buy bigger houses. They buy more clothes. They invest and they spend. And all those companies that used to buy trucks for freight? Now they have fewer expenses. They can lower their prices or invest in R&D or expansion.
There are a whole lot of things wrong with my previous example. Learning how to teleport using our minds would be much, much more disruptive than widespread adoption of free software. The point I hope it illustrates is that making tools more efficiently (the shared cost of open source with little or no overhead is much less than the cost of buying closed source software that does the same. It is like the ultimate price cut. Pay only for what you need that no one else has already paid for. Everyone saves a big expense, an expense that exists solely due to an inefficient production and distribution system. It does not take money out of the economy, it merely shifts that money around to production of end-user products rather than intermediate tools.
In any case it is a mistake to believe open source software is free. If you get a new car for helping someone build a house is the car free? It cost no money. Open source software is similar. You pay by agreeing to the terms of the license. Your payment for downloading a copy of OpenOffice is that you agree if you make any changes to the code and distribute that code, you let everyone else who agrees to the license have it too. Some would call this very cheap. Others would disagree, but I don't think it is possible to say it is free as in beer.
What it is is very, very efficient. Since it costs basically nothing to make a copy, you pay only for changes you want made and you pay that cost for everyone after you. Looking back at the auto industry, a man came up with a way to build cars faster and cheaper. His name was Ford and he applied the assembly line to the auto industry. Now fewer people could make more cars, faster, with less training. It did not ruin the economy it made a huge positive impact. Similarly, the availability to everyone of code and binaries to accomplish most any task will not ruin the computer industry, rather it will make it more efficient and benefit all.
Given the efficiency of this method, it is almost certai
LinuxDevices' summary is a tad misleading...
At least it's closer to correct than the Slashdot headline. Open standards, which the report encourages, is a far cry from open source, which the report specifically stays neutral on.
TW
See: Broken Window Fallacy
The bottom line is that spending the money on something else instead of proprietary software licenses makes the economy more efficient, and is therefore a good thing.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I think governments need to concentrate less one whether software is open source or not and concentrate instead on open document formats. I say this because, I feel that dead open source or dead closed source ends up being the same issue. With open document formats at least you can get hold of a new application and ask them to do the effort to support the format. Who do you ask if your product no longer has a development team, or volounteers, to support it?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Why can invention not be motivated by money?
See cancer research. Money motivates you to show up to collect the money. It can do nothing to motivate invention, or even the inventive spirit. You either have it or you don't. If you have it, you will pay to be allowed to invent. If you do not have it you can spend all the time you want at your job, but history will almost certainly record your life as having been wasted on passing busy time to collect a wage.
I invent on both the technology and art sides of the coin (Yesterday I spent working on a fully analog optical controler, today I'm writing a classic piano rag). Beyond the basic necessities of life my only requirements are to be left the bloody hell alone to invent. I do not need pay to produce. I need pay to be reduced to servitude.
If I were made a gift of a gold ingot I would immediately seek some idiot who thinks that the gold itself is of great value, and trade it to him for the tools and materials of invention.
And in order to keep my job, I have to produce.
Typing code is not equal to invention. It is mere labor. Most code written has been written before, better. Indeed, much code that is going to be written today, and go into production, is code that was abandoned as a bad idea decades ago, but people are "motivated" by money to recapitulate it out of ignorance.
See "Code Monkey."
See also Thoreau:
On the state of the software industry:
"Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now."
Of course these men are ignorant of their state; and so defend it vigorously.
On production:
"As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs."
See Bill Gates and Larry Ellison.
KFG