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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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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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!
I wonder how many old guard politicians will be considering anything "open" and "free" to be of a Communist nature?
The Army reading list
"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...
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.
Why go fast when you can go anywhere? O|||||||O
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.
Actually, I want the software that has thousands of eyes picking through it. That way the holes are found publicly and quickly, rather than privately, disasterously, and slowly. Think about it, its like having 1,000 people proofread your book report before you give it to the teacher rather than 1 or two other people. More eyes discover more problems quicker and are able to fix said problems in a very fast manner.
Of course their report would be an a standards based and open format like RTF or text, right?
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Some might say that opensource opens the possibilities for threats. We know that this is not the case, but I'm interested to see if this document gets through the first wave of government readers.
You raise excellent points.
Now, let us contact all other countries and get them to start their own studies about this exact same topic!!
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
But Congressperson/Senator the BSA is committed to open standards.
./'er is anything but. This will go on for a solid 10 years before there's some meaningful adoption in the U.S.
-Everyone can use word documents.
-There is a standard in place and we manage it very well thank you.
-Enforcing a single standard denies the market the ability to choose the better standard.
Today's Lesson: What is painfully obvious to the average
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
Free as in available, not free as in beer.
:)
Open Source means that you can take a look at the source code. Not that you needn't pay for using it. Or that you may use it however you want. BIG difference.
Of course you can make money with OS software. If someone wants to use it, in whole or part, he has to pay royalties (depending on the license). Sure, some companies will try to get away with ripping it, but as it's been seen in the past, such attempts rarely remain secret. And the bigger the company (and the more money is generated with it that way), the higher the danger that the (ab)use of OS soft is discovered.
Aside of the goodwill loss, using and distributing OS soft without heeding the license coming with it is just as much a crime as ripping closed source soft and distributing it.
In other words, OS soft has the benefit that a "small" company, or a private person using it, may get it for free, or at least for a nominal fee, while "big" companies (i.e. the ones with the big bucks) will have to pay for it. IMO, very fair use.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
In order to boost an economy, people need to buy things, and last time I checked, free open source software was *free*.
NOT TRUE! In order to boost an economy, people need to PRODUCE things.
For most market transactions, it happens that if someone is going to produce things someone has to be willing to buy them, which is where your confusion comes from. However, if someone makes useful stuff and gives it away for free, that is as beneficial for the economy as if someone produces the same amount of stuff and sells it all. In fact, the former situation may even be MORE beneficial to the economy if you take into account wealth distribution in addition to GDP, since the free stuff will probably be more equitably distributed.
I'm all in favor of open *standards* for public documents, but that doesn't mean vendors can't offer solutions that cost money, either in license or support fees. It's called competition, and it's what we basically don't have in the desktop market today. The MS-Office format lock-in precludes competitors from getting in; widespread adoption of something like ODF puts multiple vendors on a level playing field, and yes, allows for free/open-source implementations as well. It also facilitates looking at other OS platforms to host those implementations.
http://ecom1.sno-ski.com/oxygen.html
I think it was on this month's edition of Fast Company, bottled air is poised to be a multi-billion dollar industry next year. Same idiots who buy bottled water. Think about it, if people are willing to believe that bottled water is better than free water, and possibly that bottled air is better than free air, don't you maybe, possibly think those same people might just maybe, possibly extend those same beliefs to their choice of OS?
For a second, consider a company having EXCLUSIVE knowledge of the 'sourse' and thus possessing the power to decide what flaws get fixed and when.
The argument really works both ways, but if it is open to all who use it, that in itself is a form of security.
For example, consider a building with a building which a bomb has been placed inside. Everyone but security personel is locked out, however the security personel aren't paid to defuse a bomb and have orders to not let a soul inside... so everyone in or near the building dies, all because no one wanted to let inside the very knowledgable demolition expert who happened to be walking by. That is the Pro-Open Source argument.
However, you're saying, 'what if that demolitions expert just puts another, more destructive bomb in place and skips town?'... IDK...
Probably bad examples, but atleast i didn't "Linux Sn0b j00" http://www.reallylinux.com/docs/snobsoped.shtml
And remember, Open Source doesn't always mean operating system, a lot of the benefit is not paying license fees for 'MS Office' and other applications with far better open source replacements.
Realistically, what the F@$K harm is a 'vulnerability' in OpenOffice going to do? How would someone implement an attack on all of your personal reports and documents?
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.
i'm waiting for MS to buy/steal/swallow/take over CED and rename it Microsoft Opinion Server.
free software, open standards, open file formats, no software patents.
The neo-Cons will look at it and yell "Communism!" The Reagan conservatives (be they Democrats or Republicans) would have said, "Cool! People did this WITHOUT GOVERNMENT FORCE, and they offer tech support (for a fee). That's capitalism, Baby!"
How many US Governments are there anyhow?
I've bought 2 copies of windows - 95 and XP, plus a copy of Office. One OEM, one out of pocket - grand total to Microsoft, lifetime about $250.
You are majoring in the minors. I chose to buy those licenses because I feel more productive in Windows than in MacOS, and because quite frankly at the purchase of Win95 Linux wasn't mature enough, and at the purchase of WinXP I wanted to play games. I made the choice. I want Windows. A lot of us do. Microsoft actually does a lot of cool stuff, its too bad that there are straight up shills that see nothing more than a corporation with "commercial licenses" and because of that thinks these corporations shouldn't exist...
I don't think you understand the meaning of non-profit.
Having worked for one for several years (and having been in contact with others), I can tell you that most of them get their funding through grants which generally originate from the government (and occasionally from trusts set up by individuals or corporations).
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
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.
Studies are NOT statistics. Studies are NOT based on truth. Studies are generally sponsored by a company in the companies interest OR they are requested by the government or some government to explore some area of interest. This is why you have studies that say "studies show that people who read Slashdot are more likely to be geeks and other websurfers" or "studies indicate that being sleep-deprived is bad". In general, studies are gathered thoughts or ideas from area 'experts', and generally NOT based on measurable facts. Thus, studies cost less.
JMHO on studies. Notice that studies report 'findings'. Maybe they are more like blogs....
How many governments are there in the United States of America then? :o
Official, actual, fictional, imaginative?
As a direct result of this report, MS and IKEA signed a contract for replacing all seating devices in the Redmond headquarters with imovable ones [bolted to the floor.]
This will reduce one of the main yearly business expenses that MicroSoft needs to cover.
If that's the only mention, it's pretty bad. Why? Because "Slashdot" doesn't mean anything to most government types, and if they're the intended readership of this report, then it indicates a pretty poor writing style: dropping a random word that they're not likely to understand in, and then never defining it or using it again.
I hope that there's a glossary somewhere that explains what "Slashdot" is.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
they have standardized on windows. any flavor, all flavors. besides, MS goes to great lengths to ensure interoperability between MS application and operating systems and others.
such nonsense, this just distracts the government from it's true function. screwing up.
The Communists are our friends now, didn't you get the memo? It's The Terrorists that are the enemy.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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."
Agreed; also, I think that medical research conducted with taxpayer dollars should have to be published openly. I'm not saying that it has to be under the GFDL or anything, but it has to be available for public review, not closed up in some expensive journal that doesn't let you submit anything unless you agree never to publish it elsewhere.
The U.S. government is the biggest single supporter of medical research (that I know of) in the world, I'd sure like to be able to see the results of my money.
If you want to see a 19th or early-20th century business model that's way past its time to die, forget the music industry, take a look at the scientific journals. Ridiculously inflated membership fees for access to nothing but a lot of information that was produced by public monies in the first place, conducted in many cases at public institutions. They're the ultimate middlemen, doing nothing but trading information back and forth, preserving themselves through exclusivity agreements and via the commonly held sentiment that if it's not published there, it can't be good.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This makes me wonder if anyone even looks into the source of these reports.
Here we have an organization publishing a paper that is encouraging the use of Open Source in the government, yet these are the same people that are for globalization and outsourcing, which time and time again have been denigrated and crucified here on Slashdot and other sites of a similar nation.
I mean, check out their own About page (http://www.ced.org/about/chairman.shtml):
GLOBALIZATION & TRADE
CED's international program remains strong and saw the completion of a second project chaired by James D. Robinson III, General Partner and Co-Founder, RRE Ventures, on trade and outsourcing entitled, "Making Trade Work: Straight Talk on Jobs, Trade, and Adjustment." At CED's annual dinner on May 19, 2004, General Motors received our Excellence in Public Policy Award, and GM's former chairman and chief executive officer from 1992 to 2000, Jack Smith, spoke about GM's commitment to global corporate citizenship and also presented an overview of his company's activities in the Peoples Republic of China. GM's current chairman and CEO, Rick Wagoner, presented the CED award to Mr. Smith.
Just have a look at their projects page, and after reading the transcripts of some of their meetings, you might start wondering what's behind this interest in Open Source (http://www.ced.org/projects.shtml).
So, I guess they're OK when they're 'pursuing the Open Source agenda', but when they release a report tomorrow on how free global trade and outsourcing is the next best thing to sliced bread, we can call them devils?
Help me out here, folks....
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
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."
No one buys oxygen, either
Tell that to the people who work in the respiratory care unit of any local hospital.
OpenDocument has the distinct advantage in the U.S. of not being French. It still might have a chance.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The fewer policies the better. There is no end of problems we can point to that resulted from "things that seemed like a good idea at the time".
This is true, and I agree with you heartily on not doing things just for the sake of "doing something." However I think it's important to point out that there are situations, and I think this is one of them, where if you don't take some sort of action you allow something else to occur by default.
In other words, there already IS a policy on electronic documents, it's "use Microsoft products or nobody will read your stuff." Not doing anything simply allows that policy -- unofficial or not -- to remain in effect.
So really you are not weighing the pros and cons of one policy versus no policy, you're weighing a new policy versus the existing one. And frankly, I think the existing one sucks pretty bad.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I really wish I could stop reading headlines like this one. Given that the US government is the most backwards and currently terrifying political body that comes to mind, I think I'd like them to keep using the gimped worthless software they've got. Powerful software, in this case open sourced software, in the hands of zealots just makes for more powerful zealots.
Keeping in mind the bug and hole reduction effects of having N possible developers, where N is everybody, it's probably better for us as a society if they keep to their proprietary garbage. More frightenigly, if they didn't, think about what they might try to do with all that money they'd save?
"My heart is in the work." - Andrew Carnegie
You know, I don't need to like everything that somebody says in order to agree with one of their points. I think this report hits the nail pretty much on the head; of what I've read of it so far, I think it makes a lot of good points. I think their stance on open source is a little weak, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.
How the authors or the responsible agency feels about globalization, outsourcing, or abortion shouldn't affect what you think of this one report. They could be Nazis--literally--and their point would still be valid if it was well argued and supported by facts. It's just like dealing with a politician that I don't like most of the time, but agree with occasionally. The fact that I think somebody's stance on immigration is stupid, doesn't automatically invalidate whatever opinion they hold on healthcare.
The CED's stances on other issues are irrelevant, unless you can come up with some reason why someone who supports globalization ought to feel a particular way about open standards. They're easily separable issues, and therefore I think your inference (that we ought to engage basically in an ad hominem, attacking the organization and all of their ideas because we might disagree with one or two) is wrong.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
How sad! Hopefully the study referred to in this Slashdot article will reach a wide audience.
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
The official measurement system of the US is metric, not the English/imperial system.
All the packaged food products you buy are in grams, liters, etc. The english measurement is on there for the convenience of the consumer. Just about the only consumable item we have is gasoline and oil - the entire world uses barrels (42 US gallons). Pretty much other than that and it's all metric.
Any engineering discipline teaches the metric system. If it weren't for the US housing industry, with its 2x4's (pardon me - that's 1.5x3.5's) and 16" centers, we the consumers would have converted by now.
Metric's only hard when you try to convert measurements to english. If you stay in metric, it's a breeze.
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
Anyone can implement the PDF format without having to pay royalties to Adobe.
Of course, the Wikepedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdf_format is a bit confusing, saying in the opening sentence that it's a proprietary file format, then saying later it's an open standard...
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
That's a bit disingenuous. A BSD-style license adds value for the company incorporating it into its proprietary products. It does little directly to add value to the end-user or the customer. The GPL, on the other hand, ensures that there's a tit-for-tat: you the distributer get to use GPL code gratis - as long as you give access to the source for any enhancements you make. That ensures that the code isn't taken private - it ensures wider distribution and makes the project (or the code) stronger for it. More interest in the source, the better the resulting software for the consumer of it.
Don't tell the half of it. Tell the whole truth.
Why isn't NetBSD or OpenBSD enjoying the popularity that Linux is? Look in the mirror: it's the license it's released under.
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
to use open source software. The problem is partly with the fact that many people percieve MS Office products as the only office products worth using out there.
MS hasn't exactly been forthcoming with opening up their Office software documents' standards. And if you couple that fact to the fact that MS Office doesn't run well on anything except MS Windows or a Mac, you get the problem that we have today.
I am typing this from a machine with Win XP on it, and Office 2003.
I used to work for a private company that did some software for DoD programs. And we always went with open source programs when we could. We'd have to verify that the source did exactly what we wanted, and nothing else. And there's an initiative inside DoD and for companies that want to provide DoD with stuff to use open source software.
Um... that is what they recommended.