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Governments, Beyond the Open Source Hype
An anonymous reader writes "ForeignPolicy.com takes a look at Open Source as it applies to governments and some of the reasons that a governing body may or may not like OSS. From the article: 'Governments around the world are enchanted by open-source software. Unlike proprietary software, for which the code is kept secret, the open-source variety can be copied, modified, and shared. [...] Trouble is, the benefits of open source are not always so clear-cut. Software is too complicated a creation to be captured in rhetoric, and assertions about some of the technical benefits of open source fail to tell the whole story.'"
Tell your citizens that its cheaper and they'll thank you for it. The details about where the saved monegy goes usually become obfuscated however.
I don't get it.
And if we look her up, we find... ...as her only listed non-media job on at least one version of her bio.
Just saying.
Caveat at the bottom says it all.
"Caroline Benner is a fellow at the University of Washington's Institute for International Policy. From 2001 to 2003, Ms. Benner was a consultant with the geopolitical policy and strategy group at Microsoft."
is not switching to OSS, until it works out of the box. Most people do not have the time or patience to work on getting NIC and video drivers working. Let alone the effort involved in getting mp3's, DVD's, and the what other have you.
EGOTIST, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Ok, so your military doesn't run windows. Our military runs (or at least used to) Solaris and HP-UX... but those are closed source, too, and owned by a foreign entity.
In the end, open source provides me -- as a sovereign nation -- the ability to control the critical pieces of my own infrastructure.
That's how I (as a person) see it, anyway. Whether or not foreign governments agree, I don't know.
From the "fine" article:
To put it another way... M$ shill!!
This is how it's always going to be as well. Example: People don't move to Firefox because it's open source. They move to it because they're told it's better than IE, and they then stick with it because it's demonstrably better.
At the end of the day ideology is irrelevant to most people.
Nice to note that this is an ex-MS employee. But the person doesn't debunk a single claim, just throws out some "uncertainties" to muddy the arguement. And it's not just foriegn governments i'd worry about. I don't want MS or whoever having access to government records and information without anyone else's knowledge. Now it'd be product suicide if they did so, but it's still a risk i wouldn't want to take. The government, IMO, should use FOSS (or at least OSS) whenever they can unless a proprietary solution is the only solution IMO. Wasting tax dollars (200 per OS? 150 or more on an office suite?) so some overpaid secretary is some obscure department can send e-mails and print fax cover sheets all day is a waste that would be better spent on other tasks (or better yet, in the people's pockets).
On the one hand the article summary claims:
"Trouble is, the benefits of open source are not always so clear-cut. Software is too complicated a creation to be captured in rhetoric"
While at the same time giving us a splendidly succinct piece of rhetoric:
Unlike proprietary software, for which the code is kept secret, the open-source variety can be copied, modified, and shared. [...]
I think poorer nations have the most to gain from employing open source software. The lower real cost of obtaining and updating computer systems (when using open source options) enables them to build infrastructures that would cost many times more to operate with closed source OS's and apps.
Use the best tool for the job, regardless of philosophical ideal.
Which isn't to say that access to an application or platforms source code isn't a consideration when looking for whats best. Likewise budget is also a concern. But do not avoid a good solution, just because you feel that all software should be "free".
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
This is another totally stupid FUD story about "Open Source"
Open source does not change your computer. It does not magically make the hard drive faster and the network slower. There are no "Technical Benefits". You can write the same software as "Open Source" as you can write in propritary, and you can make the same technical mistakes. Fundamentally this means "Free as in Freedom".
The benefit of "Open Source" is that everybody can see what you have really done; your work is available for others and that others can volunteer to help you with your work.
This means that the same "Technical" system should always be demanded by Governments as "Open Source".
Governments should not be allowed to work in secret. They should not be allowed to hide from their citizens. Closed source actually forces this with no benefit. It should not be allowed for use in public systems.
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
Bug reports about the government from it's workers, Whistleblowing, is now less protected.
Talk about closed source government...
Open Source is really a threat to most governments. Open source software gives everyone equal access to the same tools, regardless of social class. It threatens the entire model of top-down hiearchy, as open source is a means for equalizing all access to information and exchange of information. Anyone can put together an Apache webserver and begin experimenting with having their own website, for free. No need for expensive schooling, as information is freely available to teach yourself. This will become a "problem" for places like the US, where we utilize the leverage of patents and trade secrets to maintain our superiority in the global marketplace. As places like India and China quickly become more technologically saavy, our economic model becomes threatened. One of the biggest keys in the future will be the regulation of the internet, and the censoring of information. I believe the best thing for the global society is free and anonymous access to all (public) information on the net.
Make your own DemocraKey, and help spread the technology for free and anonymous access to all information.
Foreign governments aren't necessarily embracing open source because its better, but rather it is not Microsoft or tied to any other US entity (Apple or Sun). It could because of nationalism, pragmatic foreign policy, or a national security issue. Whatever the reason, no government reasonably wants something as important has the operating system of their vital computers at the whim of company based in a foreign country and subject to its policy decisions. Open source is good because it is viable alternative, it is open, and they don't have to start from scratch which could take years of R&D. This isn't hard to understand.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
Trouble is, the benefits of open source are not always so clear-cut. Software is too complicated a creation to be captured in rhetoric, and assertions about some of the technical benefits of open source fail to tell the whole story.
The story is pure FUD, full of trite generalities that are intended to create doubt in the reader's mind.
In fact, the situation is quite simple: we have two kinds of software, free and open source one, and for-pay and closed-source software. Without further information, free and open source software is the default choice, in particular when it comes to tax-payer funded purchases.
The burden of proof is on those advocating proprietary software, not on those advocating free and open source software. It is people advocating proprietary software who must demonstrate, in each and every case, that the costs and risks associated with buying software from a vendor is offset by clear and significant benefits.
Is not your average computer user.
For one, its more likely to use a piece of software for decades and want to avoid concerns about the vendor end-of-lifing it, and have the resources (provided it has access to the source) to arrange its own support, so it has a lot more to gain than a consumer from OSS -- which, btw, is more than just Linux. While desktop Linux may not work "out of the box" as well as Windows (a debate for another time and place), plenty of OSS software does work out of the box as well as its commercial competition, and a lot of that is the OSS that a big purchaser like a government would be most interested in.
From the article: "Software, with its millions of lines of code, is so complicated that experts don't know for sure that open source has fewer bugs, nor can they say with certainty that having fewer bugs makes open source more secure."
That argument proves too much. If it is impossible to be certain that any software is bug-free and/or in other ways insecure, it is all the more important that one be able to examine the source code.
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
Running a nmap -P0 -O foreignpolicy.com, you get among other things:
Device type: general purpose|media device
Running: Linux 2.4.X, Pace embedded
OS details: Linux 2.4.18 - 2.4.27, Pace digital cable TV receiver
Uptime 175.187 days (since Tue Dec 6 19:18:51 2005)
So it's open source, Linux, and running continuosly for 6 months. Ahh, the coherence.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Yeah. Take a look at the source. I wonder if maybe she's still freelancing for them.
Really all the article does is point out that there's no silver bullet. She does so by pointing out that there are "claims" about open source. That's it. She doesn't dispute the claims. She just says they're claims. Unsurprisingly, she also doesn't point to the evidence of the claims.
FUD stands for "fear, uncertainty, and doubt." This may very well be a simple, subtle form of doubt-sewing. Nothing actually inaccurate in the article, that I saw, but also called into question some faily well-proven FOSS benefits (such as a lower cost of ownership).
About the worst I saw was:
Actually, most people I know don't consider "Total Cost of Ownership." That's a term made up by Microsoft in an attempt to make FOSS proponents look like they're narrow-minded and that their conclusions were incomplete and "irrelevant to business." Everybody I know looks at "cost" - period. "Cost", by definition, without any modifiers, *must* mean total cost. "Partial cost" or "license cost" may mean something other than Cost, capital C.
Likewise, relatively few people I know think Microsoft licensing is the main cost in a Microsoft shop; the legions of sysadmins and helpdesk staff, as well as the lost productivity and downtime cost quickly outweight the (relatively benign) up-front cost of Microsoft software. Take a look at Red Hat's licensing - it's actually more expensive than Microsoft on most fronts. You make it up tenfold in reduced operating expenses, however, and you can save even more in operating expenses if you go with a more technologically advanced flavour such as Debian GNU/Linux (you also reduce the up-front procurement costs as well).
Bah. I can't believe I wasted five minutes debunking this Microsoft-shill fluff piece.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
This isn't just about control. This is about jobs.
With any closed source software not written in your country, you're importing it and sending your money to another country.
If you pour some cash into your education system and train up your own programmers to modify the Open Source code to suit your needs, you're investing in your own people. The money stays in your country. Those programmers pay taxes to you on that money.
And you've got to realize that this is going to be a very important field in the future. Do you really want your people left behind?
From the Article... it is misleading to say that open source empowers people in ways proprietary software does not. Both open source and proprietary software allow you to change the behavior of a software program in significant ways without touching the program's source code
Those two sentences go beyond mere FUD to outright deception.
Bad doggie! No cookie for you!
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
No, No, No! The headline and much of the article is extremely misleading).
Sure, governments are starting to use Linux as the ONLY viable alternative to the hated Microsoft.
But that's it. While Linux is open source, open source is not defined by using Linux.
Much of the US government explicitly bans open source and I've supported 2 foreign government contracts that also had explicit anti-open source requirements. And they ban open source specifically because it is a potential security risk. In fact, it seems quite reasonable to question why the US (or European) countries would want to use open source code that may have been developed in China or even France (or others countries well known for their industrial espionage).
In any case, who the hell actually believes open source is MORE secure simply because they publish their millions of lines of code? Like ANY customer is actually going to look at the code.
Ok, before flaming, I agree some, well tested, well accepted, and well controlled open source with blessed versioning is more secure (probably MUCH more secure) because of exhaustive testing and support by real companies, but that's VERY different than arguing it's more secure governments can peek at the source code.
As a side note, open STANDARDS are a completely different topic and all governments want, love, and support open standards. Unfortunately, Open Source and Open Standards are very often confused by governments and government contracts.
That said, some countries like open source because it providesa competative advantage. For instance, China is rapidly excelling in HW production so open source acts to undermine the competative advantages more developed countries have built up in their commercial software industries. (That, and open source allows the Chinese government to insert all sorts of filters in place, but that's a different story).
>>Across the globe, politicians are embracing open-source software with grand pronouncements >>and great expectations.
False. It has less to do with the politicians. It has more to do with the real people who need this to happen. The inertia comes straight from software developers that believe in the common good and the synergy that can happen people share ideas and creations.
>>Although they are correct to identify potential benefits, software is far more complicated >>than their talking points, and it may disappoint those with outsized hopes.
I smell FUD(Fear Uncertainty Doubt)...particularly some seeds of UNCERTAINTY being disseminated in this statement. "It may disappoint...?"
The people open-source projects may disappoint are mostly "Microcerfs" such as Mrs. Benner herself
>>>Caroline Benner is a fellow at the University of Washington's Institute for International >>Policy. From 2001 to 2003, Ms. Benner was a consultant with the geopolitical policy and >>>strategy group at Microsoft.
>>>Trouble is, the benefits of open source are not always so clear-cut. Software is too >>>complicated a creation to be captured in rhetoric, and assertions about some of the >>>technical benefits of open source fail to tell the whole story.
MORE FUD.
>>"There are really two reasons that it is very difficult to know whether software is >>secure," says Stanford University computer scientist Alex Aiken. "The first reason is that >>even the simplest software program consists of hundreds of thousands to millions of parts, >>and potentially all of these have to be correct, or the system may have security >>vulnerabilities.
The same goes for closed proprietary software. Stalemate here Mrs. Benner.
>>The second reason is that we have no technology for systematically
>>checking that the parts are correct and fit together in a way that ensures security."
These are a work in progress. The same goes for closed proprietary software. Stalemate here Mrs. Benner.
>>The Chinese have a preference for open source because they distrust software that cannot >>be audited, a concern that became especially acute after the discovery of the phrase >>"_NSAKEY" (thought to refer to the National Security Agency) in the code of Microsoft's >>Windows software in 1999.
Mrs. Benner is certainly not scoring any points to support proprietary software by mentioning this fact.
>>Microsoft has sought to allay worries over trapdoors by allowing governments to peruse its >>code.
That said, the general public, the tax payers giving the money to the governments to serve them well are not allowed to look at Microsoft's source code. Microsoft is certainly not winning any points here either. Contrary to what some people may think, not all of the world's innovative software developers work for Microsoft or for the governments. The trapdoors might not be detected by anyone working for Microsoft or the government. Besides I find it arrogant to think that regular tax payers should not be allowed access to source code to see what Microsoft has delivered to the government considering the tax payers should be able to see what kind of value they are getting for their money. I am actually proposing that all Microsoft source code should be made RMS compliant (GPL) because that is the right thing to do. The work Microsoft did is ultimately all the tax payer's property.
>>>Furthermore, software is so complex that serious source code manipulation and maintenance >>>is a high-cost endeavor,
There are many pieces of open source code out there available to do whatever you can think of. If it doesn't do what you can think of, there usually is something close that you can use, make do with, or modify.
>>computer science is too young a discipline, and there is too much we do not yet know about >>software to be so sure.
I personally don't think the options you give are very likely.
Ok, so I see the new tags under each story. Now, how do I actually browse by tag? For example, how do I find all the stories tagged as web20? Isn't that the point of tags? I'm probably just not doing something right, but when I click a tag, it just pops up a little window allowing me to enter more tags.
Not enough room for the final "s" in the subject.
... and it may even be applicable for short term goals.
... we build the tools we use. If the tools that suit your philosphical ideals are not sufficient to the task, then make them sufficient.
Anyway, this "Use the best tool for the job, regardless of philosophical ideal" sounds nice
BUT
It's only code. And governments have the money to hire the people to write the code that is the tools.
If there isn't an Open Source tool that will work for the project due next Friday, that's one thing.
But if you never start writing the tools as Open Source, they will never be available. You know what tools you use.
Use the best tool for the job, regardless of philosophical ideal.
That is a philosophical ideal in itself, one saying that getting the job done is the most important thing there is. Which in turn invalidates the phrase as stated, as it is *not* regardless of philosophical ideal.
That getting the work done is the most important thing - especially in any imaginable case - is something a lot of people would disagree on. Sometimes other things are more important than the trains rolling on time, you know.
It's also a very bad saying in that it rarely actually states what a best tool is. Maybe MS Office is the best tool for writing a document today, but is it going to be the best tool for reading it tomorrow? You can't just blurt random stuff like that to get karma without clarifying how you know what the best tool is.
Thank you.
Proprietors agree with you, which is why they're interested in cutting their prices or giving away gratis copies of their software to large-seat clients in exchange for locking government users into something that will pay off (both monetarily and in terms of control) in the future. Money is not and should not be the chief rationale by which these decisions are made or else more valuable points that pay off now and in the future will be lost.
Digital Citizen
Highly classified government programs....labs, R&D, etc....DO get windows source code....MS engineers were basically assinged full time to several projects to provide source code and go over it line by line with the agency engineers who wanted to be sure of what they were using/customizing.
The idea that people on here have that the US government agencies at the highest levels do NOT get Windows source code is very naive...
> and assertions about some of the technical benefits of open source fail to tell the whole story.
Open-source is not about technical benefits at all.
Open-source is exclusively about licensing benefits, which leads to a whole set of legal, economic, and political ramifications.
It's extremely misleading to say that the technical benefits of open-source "fail to tell the whole story". In fact, open-source is completely technology neutral -- so there's really no story to tell here. An equal number of anecdotes can be found to suggest either the superiority or the inferiority of open-source.
Benner's article states:
'In a 2002 letter to Microsoft, Peruvian Congressman Edgar David Villanueva Núñez noted that, "Relative to the security of the software itself, it is well known that all software (whether proprietary or free) contains 'errors' or 'bugs' (in programmers' slang). But it is also well-known that the bugs in free software are fewer." Yet, ask computer security experts and they'll tell you that's not necessarily true. Software, with its millions of lines of code, is so complicated that experts don't know for sure that open source has fewer bugs, nor can they say with certainty that having fewer bugs makes open source more secure.'
This statement is true, as far as it goes. But it ignores something that's far more important than the opinion of a computer scientist: empirical evidence. No matter how you measure it, FOSS software is successfully exploited far less often than proprietary software. In many cases, the differences are striking. There are, for example, effectively no Linux viruses in the wild.
Even in cases where FOSS is the dominant application (like the Apache web server, for example) the number of successful attacks are so much lower that there is no effective competition from the alternatives.
So the key here is not whether software is provably secure (i.e. auditable) but that it's effectively secure. The difference here is subtle, especially to those who don't understand software. It's something crucially important, however.
There's another issue here that's at the core of the Free Software philosophy: process. The FOSS software development process is based entirely delivering quality software. In fact, development cycles and processes often sacrifice convenience for IT folks in favour of solid code. Proprietary software is almost always driven by business priorities which sometimes - but not always - put a low priority on software quality.
Another quotation from the article:
'There are really two reasons that it is very difficult to know whether software is secure [....] The first reason is that even the simplest software program consists of hundreds of thousands to millions of parts, and potentially all of these have to be correct, or the system may have security vulnerabilities. The second reason is that we have no technology for systematically checking that the parts are correct and fit together in a way that ensures security."'
Both of these points (that even simple software is hopelessly complex, and that there is no systematic way to test intereactions between software) are inaccurate. It's like saying that human bodies are composed of billions of cells, so we'll never be able to measure a person's health.
Unix-inspired systems usually use a 'toolkit' approach, in which a number of small, special-purpose tools are brought together to perform complex tasks. The result is that each individual part is very well understood and performs its task(s) in a clear fashion. So, while it may be true that it's hard to document every possible interaction between software elememts, that's not nearly the problem the writer makes it out to be.
The article concludes:'Software becomes more interesting--indeed, rhetoric-worthy--when it promises a better future. Open source may well deliver that promise, but computer science is too young a discipline, and there is too much we do not yet know about software to be so sure.'
This is a silly argument, especially in an article that claims to compare two alternative approaches to software. Computer science is not a young discipline, even if you compare it to physics and mathematics. The fundamentals of computing were understood even before we had computers to test with. The assertion that we just don't know enough is just plain wrong-headed.
Furthermore, even if it is true that we don't know enough, shouldn't that be an argument in favour of open source, where at least nothing is deliberately hidden?
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
... as are most of the body shops that install and implement these projects. There only foreign if you live outside the US. Following that logic shouldn't the US governments be supporting their own US economy and buying more software from the big boys?
We do not inherit the Earth from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
I work in municipal gov't in Florida. We use a lot of open source software in our organization. Why? Because it works. It has little to do with money. I've never been denied money for software if I can justify it.
"Enterprise" software has never really impressed me. A great deal of the time, the guy on the other end of support is no more knowledgable than me of the product. That is when you are lucky enough to get someone who speaks english natively. So what's the point for lackluster support? (Hardware is the exception. Many service plans can guarantee you a new server in less than 4 hours).
Highly specialized software generally has an unreasonable amount of bugs. We have one dept that has "enterprise level software", that I'm in the process of rewriting its so buggy. It's almost as if this company has no regression testing procedures in place.
And it's always a lot of fun paying 2,000k a pop for marginal glue code between applications. God-forbid that gluecode break one side. You'll get thorwn into a fun blame game of each company blaming the other. You need complex glue code? That'll be $10,000 and 6 months. You'll also recieve a windows front end in tk with extremely complex install directions. Minor versions are incompatible. You can never patch that box because xp sp2 will break the very customized non-standard registry settings.
People can spread all the FUD they want about open source, but I use it on a daily basis whenever I can. I have control over it and things just work. It's comical to see some of the rediculous things that go on in the closed source community. I like being able to change the ip address of a server if I have to. I don't need a license holding me back from doing that.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
It is also easy for geeks to forget that most people don't even know what software is. Voters are far more interested in other issues like reality TV, tax, terrorism an whether or not the prez is getting blowjobs.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
That is where the perceived threat is--government listens first and foremost to the rich people, because of the assumption that is what is good for the rich people is good for the nation. There is no Marxist or Kafkaesque plot to keep the poor away from quality software.
Vague statements negative. "This opinion/that opinion" pseudo-balance. Nothing you can pin down, but clearly intended to induce FUD in people who aren't knowledgable about software.
... of OSS vs proprietary software.
There are serious fact-based positions wrt security, feature-set, TCO,
This woman knows none of it. At best, she is someone who picked up on the Zeitgeist at MS, and had enough political pull to get an article into FP. At worst, she is a professional spreader of FUD for MS.
Once OSS becomes commonplace in divisons like the IRS, congress will be much less likely to pass bills that jeopardize operations (like tax collection). Their adoption almost ensures continued protections for the GPL and the open source community in general. If only they'd start giving tax breaks to OSS developers for performing a patriotic duty... I can dream, right?
The US Air Force does not like open source. They block all open source sites
on firewalls. Calling them "freeware/shareware". Cannot even get to apache.org
anymore
"auditing any source code in order to ensure there are no security vulnerabilities is nigh on impossible"
True, if the auditor is a government, even a large, well-funded government. If the auditor is the entire computing population of the earth, it's easier.
Which gets us full circle: the way you find faults an exceedingly complex device/program is to drop it onto as large a population as possible; put it into service in as many widely-varying situations as you can, and the overall uptime stats will show you which pieces of gosh-this-is-complicated software are most stable. EOF.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
who the hell actually believes open source is MORE secure simply because they publish their millions of lines of code? Like ANY customer is actually going to look at the code.
Apparently everyone else but you...
The keyword you missed is 'inherently'. Having a lot of independent eyeballs on the code is essential priciple for locating bugs and avoiding backdoors. That's why even proprietary software companies pay for 'verification' by 'independent' certifiers. And there is not a single closed encryption algorithm in the world that is considered secure. There is simply no security in obscurity.
Your disclaimer is no excuse for this FUD where you imply that somehow adversaries could slip compromising code into open source projects used in government contracts. The chances of such code remaining unnoticed is much less than in proprietary projects where you merely have to bribe one key developer. And nobody runs mission critical things off latest source trees anyway. The blanket ban on all 'open source' software is likely a kneejerk reaction by uninformed byrocrats. Or perhaps they're already owned by the vendors and private companies the contracts predictably go to.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Open Source isn't about cost. It's about getting your soverignity back.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
have fun
The author also identifies the support for FOSS by IBM and HP, and identifies their contributions to FOSS.
Finally, TFA identifies the author as a consultant to MS, not an employee. Big, big difference.
from the article...
Baby Gnu and Tux (Gnu/Linux): Should governments place outsized hopes on these pint-sized guys?
are you claiming they should put their outsized hopes in the hands of an pyschotic, chair throwing, "developers, developers, developers" ranting maniac?
uh, lady, why didn't you link to b stevo's little develpers dance video?
i'm sure the governors of these great nations would love to see stevo in action, duntcha think?
OH, THAT'S RIGHT... MICROSOFT *PAID* YOU.
I agree... the 20th time COULD be legitimate information.
Nah... after almost (or is it over?) 20 years of this crap (DOS aint' done til Lotus won't run...), there is no longer any doubt to give the benefit of.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Software is too complicated a creation to be captured in rhetoric
That didn't stop them from jumping head first into Java and OOP. Even if you like OOP, you have to admit that there was very little verification of promises going on before big companies went for it.
Table-ized A.I.
Caroline Benner is a fellow at the University of Washingtons Institute for International Policy. From 2001 to 2003, Ms. Benner was a consultant with the geopolitical policy and strategy group at Microsoft.
Just what does a software company need a Geopolitical Policy and Strategy Group for anyway? Gobal FUD? Creepy, and she's got a long history of M$ apologies and FUD to her name. Let's review,
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
it perpetuates and creates more government. Overall this is bad. Sure, it promotes some level of commercial business activity through paid support for the government software, but it kills innovation. Ever heard the saying, "Good enough for government work"? Well, that's just about right. If the government produces a mediocre or even a poor product and makes it available for free, it becomes very difficult for businesses with better products and practices to survive, let alone thrive. To top things off, government produced software is often completely free, as in public domain, and government agencies often have big budgets to promote their inferior works. Essentially the government buys supporters, so it can close out competition and maintain its size and stature.
It is the freedom to choose future vendors that follows with free software. You don't have a single vendor who is the only one who can inspect, modify and redistribute the code. Anyone can do that, which ensures competition, which ensures the lowest cost in the long run.
The initial cost of free software is usually higher, as a vendor of proprietary software can sell the product below production cost, with the expectation of making the money back later in support and manitanence.
Which again is why we should work to make it official policy to require all software to be covered by a free software license in *any* organization where we are members (including the temptation), as there will be a temptation for decision makers to make the purchase that is cheapest in this budget year, and ignore the expenses later on.
Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS or FLOSS): .
* Why OSS/FS? Look at the Numbers! (Paper)
* Why FLOSS? Look at the Numbers! (Presentation)
* OSS/FS References
* How to Evaluate OSS/FS Programs
* Generally Recognized as Mature (GRAM) OSS/FS Programs
* Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else
* High Assurance (for Security or Safety) and Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS)... with Lots on Formal Methods (aka high confidence or high integrity)
. .
* What Should Governments Examine in Acquiring COTS Open Source Software (OSS)?
I have a friend that started working as a civil servant in a Canadian government office as an IT/Database specialist. First off, they use Dell, Windows, etc etc etc. Need a memory upgrade, the office buys a whole new set of Dell servers instead of just upgrading the memory of existing servers. Why? First, because if you don't spend your buget, you can't get a buget increase, second, its just easier to buy a box of goods from Dell rather then having to put something together. Governments consider manpower to be expensive. The paying the $200+ an hour union worker to put together a custom system is more expensive then just forking over a million to Dell for plug and play devices. Yeah, it doesn't make sence, but its the government.
He was having to browse through endless database reports day after day in order to find and fix errors and eventually he got fed up and told his supervisor that he could easily write a script to browse these documents, parse out the errors, and generate a more concise report in a few seconds that would speed up his job like 10000%.
He wanted to use PHP or Perl or something, but it was something that was open sourced tool. The supervisor thought it was a great idea, but the office he is in has a strict policy NOT to install anything OPEN SOURCED. In order to implement the open source application/utility, it would have to go through a bunch of committee meetings and validation and red tape just to prove that the product wouldn't jeopardize security and other such nonsense.
So, when I hear stories about how governments are embracing open source, I have to laugh out loud.
There are two times a government will embrace open source:
1) A senator, governor, or some other ranking official wants to save money in his office or ministry or department and deludes themselves into believing that installing Linux instead of licencing windows will save them money. The saved money of course will just pad the pockets of the ranking official or be spent on other perks in order to maximise the budget. I.e. if you department wastes $5 million a year on computer expenses, why not use open source, save a few million, and allocate those funds to some other pet project or perk?
2) Some friend or business acquaintance of a ranking official has an IT consulting firm and gets a huge ridiculously overpaid contract to implement open source products poorly. The government will pay the guy millions of dollars to implement open source, the guy will screw up, and three years later the government will abandon the project and switch back to a Dell/Windows canned solution.
I touched upon a valid point above, and that is, ANY government department doesn't truly want to save money. If they had a buget of 10 million one year, and then using open source without some political pressure to implement it reduces their budget to 5 million, no government department wants to see their budget slashed in half. Buying Dell and Windows boxes ensures that next years budget will be 20% - 50% more then the previous years. Its just taxpayers money. No government department is given the incentive to SAVE money. Its the government, they print their own money remember, COST IS NOT A FACTOR!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry, governments are not embracing open source. At least not the G8 countries. They do so only for self serving reasons like they want to spend more money on perks instead of the IT infrastructure of their department. When implementing an open source script tool takes months of meetings and approvals how is it that a Linux based database server is going to be implemented. When open source is cheaper to setup, how does that jive with the fact that government departments want to go overbudget every year so they can get more money then the next? I don't buy it.
Thats what you'll spend most of your 4 hours doing- trying to figure out whats in your box and getting it to work.
Or you could just go to Dell's website, type in your computer's model and number, and just download them. But if you want to spend 4 hours hunting all over, be my guest.
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And what if someone at microsoft decides to start a war to do so?
Maybe you trust Microsoft as a company (If so your crazy), but even given that do you trust microsoft employees? For example, consider the amount of information your computer sends microsoft by default, including crash dumps and the like. Lets say a computer belonging to a secretary in the CIA crashes, and automatically sends some insanely sensitive information to microsoft. Some Microsoft employee sees this while looking through the crash dump.. Bam government leak. Microsoft did nothing wrong, arguably the employee didn't either.
Worse, Consider an employee writing a patch, lets say the put in a little back door that no-one is likely to find in their internal audit process. That chunk of code makes it out and hits all of the NSA's servers. That employee could inject information and start wars if they wanted.
If your really paranoid consider someone at the top of the company wants a country destroyed. They can do it! Yes it's corporate suicide, but they can still destroy a country in the process. I can hand my neighbor a nuke and say "please don't use this... we wont like you if you do". But I don't, and for good reason.
This NCS analysis supports the SWG's finding that viruses and worms prevalent across the Internet at the time of the outage did not have any significant impact on power generation and delivery systems.
Their definition of "significant" should be examined, but that's not the conclusion I was quoting. It was entirely possible that the systems were overloaded by network traffic and that's what caused them to not trigger miss alarms. That's why the issue was investigated. Whether or not that would constitute a "significant" impact or not is something only the report writers can answer. What's not denied by the above is that critical communications between operators and management were impeded. The lack of human operators to get what they needed is a significant problem.
This is not some opinion I pulled out of my ass. Schneier came up with it and the accident report does little to refute his notions. Specifically (pages 50 and 51), the number one cause of the accident is "inadequate system understanding". Remote terminals then the main system failed along with it's alarms. As Schneier noted the report states:
14:54 EDT. However, for over an hour no one in FEs control room grasped that their computer systems were not operating properly, even though FEs Information Technology support staff knew of the problems and were working to solve them
You can take it back further to the first failures of the State Estimators due to network communications problems. It was this problem that had IT people fooling with the system to begin with. Later, the alarm system stalled. I imagine both of these problems can be traced back to the blaster worm then tearing through corporate networks the world over. They did not get their contingency planning systems back till 16:04 (p49). The report, for one reason or another, does not mention the exact reason for the SE failures so all we have is strong coincidence.
For the second time in two weeks, I've had to correct you when you blamed an operating system you don't like for errors in somebody else's software.
Your compulsions and ideas are entirely your own, but I'm flattered by your close attention to my writing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This is how it's always going to be as well. Example: People don't move to Firefox because it's open source. They move to it because they're told it's better than IE, and they then stick with it because it's demonstrably better. At the end of the day ideology is irrelevant to most people.
They're not independent issues. It's better, in large part, *because* it's free. That's not just a coincidence.
Your claim sounds like: "Well, yeah, Cubans cross the sea on shoddy rafts for America because they're told it's better, and then stay because it's demonstrably better. At the end of the day ideology is irrelevant to most people."
Except that we're better *because* we're not a communist dictatorship. And as soon as people see (saw) the connection, they start demanding the "cause" so they can get the "effect". Do you want to live in a communist dictatorship? Hell, no, they suck! Can I identify exactly how my life would be worse under one? Well, no, not exactly. I don't often make statements that a communist dictator would actually take issue with (this comment notwithstanding). I don't have much money. I don't know how my life would be worse, really, except that I'm pretty sure it would be.
When we try to keep "it's better" and "it's open-source" separate, our rhetoric tends to sound like Cold War jingoism: our kitchen is better than yours, nya nya nyah!
It's better *because*...