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.'"

Comments

...And the FUD-spreading site runs on what?

[orzetto]

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.

Heh. Take a look at the source.

[dbarclay10]

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.

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:

For example, they believe that the total cost of ownership of open-source software is lower than that of proprietary software because they avoid the expensive licensing fees that companies like Microsoft charge.

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.

Hire your own people.

[khasim]

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?

Re:The sweet smell of plastic grass

[Ithika]

nor can they say with certainty that having fewer bugs makes open source more secure

Well, that's a good one. "There's no evidence that our product, having more flaws than their product, is actually any worse."

Oh puh-lease.

Re:Not necessarily. Decide for *yourselves*

[Russ Nelson]

Are we really so insecure in our convictions that the slightest whiff of Microsoft makes us cry 'shill'?

It's not insecurity. It's not wanting people to be misled by non-facts.

It is *not* the money, at least not at first

[Per Abrahamsen]

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.

Re:Its the money, first and foremost

[jesterzog]

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 work in a non-US government department. Our government has its own policy on Open Source (developed by another dept), which is non-committal but non-inhibiting, and little more than a document that describes the main issues with using open source. The public and politicians don't know whether we use OSS or not, and I doubt they care. (Except for one politician who released a press release on OSS once, but it didn't get noticed by anyone.)

When it comes to using OSS, we simply use it when it makes sense to do so. There's no iron fist reaching down dictating to us what to do, and I hope there never is. We give our users Windows desktops because that's what they tend to be most comfortable with, we run predominantly Windows servers administered by people who know what they're doing, and also have a few Linux boxes thrown in where it makes sense to do so. Any or all of this may change in the future, but I like to think that it'll change because we've decided it's appropriate to change. We use open source in all sorts of places for support systems. Usually it's because the open source apps available for those particular tasks do a better job, or are more reliably supported. We use a lot of closed source software, too, because sometimes there just aren't the OSS apps for the specialist needs that certain people in the department have.

Amusingly it's often easier to get help from an interested community than it is from a closed source distributor who's charging a large support contract. Personally I think that the main purpose of support contracts is to be able to attribute blame to someone else not having fixed a problem, but they're still needed with closed source because it's impossible for anyone else to fix the problem. It's probably every month or so that we come across Outlook or some other similar app displaying a weird behaviour, the company (Microsoft in this case) ignores it, and all that people in the community can say is that 'it happens for me too, maybe try this'. Open source is completely different. eg. I'm currently writing an in-house CA software, and the two projects we've found that are easiest to use for building this (OpenSSL and CryptLib), are both Open Source. They both have active communities, and I'm quite confident that if/when I have problems or find bugs with either, there would be an immediate response, whether it's fixing them, or telling me what I should be doing differently.

Open source and closed source both have their place, and I think it's great when governments develop an official awareness of them. In my own government, though, I really hope we never get forced to use one or the other for political reasons.