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

Its the money, first and foremost

[rob_squared]

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.

Re:Its the money, first and foremost

[Bogtha]

More importantly, not only is it cheaper, but the money that is spent on it goes back into the local economy rather than straight into the pockets of a foreign company, because the government have the option of hiring any local firms willing to do the work instead of simply whoever holds the copyright.

Written by an ex-Microsoft employee.

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is written by a Ms. Caroline Benner.

And if we look her up, we find...

Caroline Benner previously worked as policy researcher for Microsoft's Geopolitical Policy and Strategy Group

...as her only listed non-media job on at least one version of her bio.

Just saying.

Re:Written by an ex-Microsoft employee.

[jmorris42]

> Caroline Benner previously worked as policy researcher for Microsoft's Geopolitical
> Policy and Strategy Group

Ya know, I knew something like that was coming before I clicked into this article. The summary alone smelled of astroturf. But they do it because they realize while we will spot the paid 'independent scholarship' almost instantly the intended audience either won't.

If I were a foreign government

[MarkEst1973]

Why the hell would I want to entrust all my gov't operations, all my military, all my businesses' computing needs to a closed source, foreign (from my point of view) vendor... like, say, MS?

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.

OSS isn't everything

[linvir]

In practical terms OSS is only relevant as a part of a wider policy. Brazil's Digital Inclusion (Google translation) is a good example. OSS barely even figures in the rhetoric for this. It's just one enabling factor.

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.

Re:Your average computer user

[AuMatar]

THen they should be coming to Linux in droves. My last Windows install took 4 hours and required me to hunt for drivers all over the web, and reboot a dozen times. My last Linux install worked smoothly with all hardware recognized.

...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.

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.

Penny-wise and future foolish.

[jbn-o]

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.

Because it works

[porkThreeWays]

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.