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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."
I always wondered why governments cannot see the benefits without the help of any study. Anyway, I am currently downloading the document. But all governments should be informed of such useful studies. What is good for US governments might be useful for other governments too!
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"should be promoted as a matter of public policy, in order to foster innovation and economic growth in the U.S. and world economies."
Devil's advocate: I've found that as a general rule, people are motivated by money, thus motivated to invent when a paycheck is on the line. Plus, if a "no name" from a small economy invents something new and grand enough for everyone to want it, then by chargin for their product they would be causing their econmy to grow.
...just thinking out loud...
Why go fast when you can go anywhere? O|||||||O
Whenever the government implements sweeping policies such as those discussed in this article there are unintended consequences which, in the end, oftentimes dwarf the predicted benefits of the policy. The classic example of this of course is when FDR implemented a wage freeze during WWII. Clever companies, in order to keep and attract good employees, began to offer to pay for their employees' health insurance. Fast forward 60 years and look at the mess that helped to create.
So, what sort of unintended consequences would a mandate to use OSS/standards-based software bring about? Well, armed with the sourcecode, it is easy to envision government IT people customizing the application in order to "better integrate with their work procedures" or "enhance the security". Play this out over 10 years and what you wind up with is chaos, with the very thing you were hoping to achieve (interoperability) lost in a myriad of incompatible, "enhanced" applications.
"Embrace and extend" is human nature, it is not just a Microsoft failing.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
This needs to be balanced with the fact that many subjects simply do not need an "expert" to understand. No matter how many years you have studied the earths atmosphere, and how many degrees you have, I still don't need you to tell me what color the sky is. Things like, "Is it good for the people when the government mandates reliance on a corporation, and requires the people to purchase products from a specific corporation to take part in society?", simply do not need an "expert" to answer.
Very well said. I tried to say something similar elsewhere, but I think you did a better job.
One thing I'd like to hammer home is the redundancy argument: with closed-source software, everyone pays for the same thing, OVER AND OVER again. I buy Windows, you buy Windows. We both got the exact same thing. With free software, you don't pay for the copy of the software, you pay to make that software better for you. It's only "free" (as in beer) if it does exactly what you want it to do out of the box, if it doesn't do that, you pay someone to customize it for you.
We (especially PHBs) don't think of software that way; we think about it in terms of black boxes. It either does what you want it to do or it doesn't. But that's not necessarily how it has to be; if we weren't all paying a few hundred dollars in order to have what everybody else has, we'd have a lot of money left over to make that software better (however we think 'better' is). Would we pour all the money we're now spending on duplicate copies into development? Probably not, but there would still be a giant net benefit. Paying people to improve something is always better than paying people to make one halfassed thing and then sell it a hundred million times over.
The problem is that traditional closed-source software houses are still stuck in a manufacturing analogy. They want to think of themselves as giant Ford or GM plants, turning out "units" that they then sell for a certain fixed price to everyone. But that's really a crummy way to market software, profitable as it may be in the short run for the people running the factories. It encourages a least-common-denominator approach to making software that results in gear that's inflexible and does many things poorly rather than one thing well.
A better approach would be for smaller software companies to concentrate on making a product that fulfills a particular role or job, while leveraging previously existing products. If you stick to open standards, then everyone can use their own customized tools, but still talk to each other, while at the same time the society gets more and more advanced software.
If there's one single contribution that Free Software makes, in my opinion, it's that. It keeps you from having to pay for the same old crap a hundred times over, and instead gives you the freedom to apply those resources that you would have used to other things -- including making the software better.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This isn't quite true. You wouldn't have to convert all of the past documents. As long as they're just sitting in place (on disk or wherever), they're fine in their current formats, provided a open-source interpreter / reader exists. Then they can be converted to the new, open format on demand, when they're accessed or needed. (This isn't much of a trick, I remember old versions of Clarisworks that would do this with old documents: open an old document and it would open, but on save you'd be prompted to create a new file for a the new format. If you really wanted an old version saved you Exported.)
Right now, most of the proprietary formats aren't so bad that we can't break out of them. OpenOffice will read DOC files, for example. So today's DOC files are relatively safe, but that does't mean the ones produced by the next version of Word will be. That's why it's important to move to creating documents in an open format, so you don't get any further locked-in, using whatever worse format MS invents tomorrow.
By stopping using newer versions of the proprietary format/software, you effectively freeze that format in place. You say "no more proprietary additions, no changes." That makes it a lot easier to reverse engineer and write an interpreter that can convert those documents on demand, as they're needed. It's the continual use and updating of documents into proprietary, undocumented formats that's the major problem, because the "moving target" effect makes them basically impossible to reverse-engineer. (Plus I'm waiting for the day when reverse engineering a Word document will be a DMCA violation.)
As long as you stop yourself from getting any deeper in the black hole of vendor lock-in, it's possible (at least right now) to dig yourself out and rescue your old documents using free tools, whenever you need them. Mass-conversion might be nice, since it'll make things a little easier to work with later, but it's really not necessary provided you have open source tools to convert them already (which we do in the case of Word documents, and that's the biggest issue).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."