City of Vancouver Adopts Open Standards

rbrander writes "Vancouver, Canada's third-largest city, has adopted a policy of 'open standards, interfaces and formats' for all public data. They will also consider open-source software on an even footing with proprietary for all new software purchases. Fifteen of the fifteen people who signed up to speak to city council on the topic spoke in favor. Their only criticism was, 'can't you do more?' with one advocating that free and open source software be given preference, not equal footing."

Comments

One good point about the Economical Crisis.

[vawarayer]

It's good that in tough times, our elected people stop and think outside the box a bit.

Re:One good point about the Economical Crisis.

[BikeHelmet]

It's not so much thinking outside the box, as not forgetting what you put in it.

When you can't open documents from a decade and a half ago, because they were stored in some incompatible proprietary format, you can't help but get a bad taste in your mouth for the company that caused it.

Now if you can complete your required task by using free software instead, and you have a guarantee that format will always be supported... well, make the logical jump.

Even if it isn't always supported, you can save the sourcecode, and decades from now you just get some enterprising novice coder to create a plugin to load it, for some money and experience. ;)

Re:One good point about the Economical Crisis.

[BikeHelmet]

This is a solution for accessing any legacy soft and hard format, given sufficient resources.

Reverse engineering a binary format from a decade and a half ago is harder than converting old source code into new source code.

One requires a skilled individual, or maybe even team. The other requires a less skilled individual. Converting between programming languages isn't exactly rocket science. (it isn't assembly, either)

The enterprising novice only has to understand the source, and then re-implement it as a plugin in his favourite language.

(Contemplate what happens when current source code formats become incompatible...)

Do you really think C will be gone in a couple decades? ;)

Those of us that love it do not. Those of us that do not love it, also do not. C is very resilient.

Re:One good point about the Economical Crisis.

[penix1]

ummm...no. They can get a version of the distro it was built on and install it on that computer in the museum. That's the strength of open source. Every version back to the beginning is, and will be, available somewhere. Given the DRM contained in most closed source programs, good luck finding an activation server around that will allow the program to run.

Re:One good point about the Economical Crisis.

[Nefarious Wheel]

The problem with word docs goes beyond business philosophy. Technically the file format is a bit of a mess, and OLAP was it's name oh. It's complex, format piled upon format and probably not well understood (they haven't really improved their office suite materially since Joel Spolsky left, imho).

I do not equate complexity with sophistication, myself, but then I'm just a very old geek and I could be wrong.

Welcome

[Nemyst]

I, for one, welcome our new open source Canuck overlords.

Vancouver is Awesome

[Phrogman]

I am glad to see the city where I was born is leading the rest of Canada in adopting support for open standards. Hopefully this is a foot in the door that prompts the rest of Canada to follow suit.

Vancouver, and British Columbia in general has always had a very strong Linux community. Victoria (the provincial Capital) has always had a fairly strong LUG going for as long as I can remember.

Re:Vancouver is Awesome

[CarpetShark]

The UK did the "equal consideration" thing years ago (I think around 2002/3). A few years later, I was still seeing government contracts being awarded based on statements like (actual quote) "Your tender was perfect, except for one word we wanted to hear: Microsoft".

Equal consideration isn't enough; it's a weasel word to appease people who care, while continuing with the status quo. Government buyers take risks only when forced to do so be legal requirements.

It would be nice...

[viyh]

...if all government agencies adopted this policy. After all, what good is using standards if they aren't used across the board? Plus, there are so many "open standards" in many cases that it kind of defeats it's own purpose.

Re:It would be nice...

[jpedlow]

Sorry Friend, it's laughable at best. :( The problem is that the provincial government of British Columbia has a branch, called WTS: http://www.sharedservicesbc.gov.bc.ca/Workplace_Technology_Services/supplier.htm these people handle all of the computers on the provincial level. Basically, you've got a lot of hardcore geeks bound by red tape and managers who know nothing about computers in general. (Same old story, right?) Anyway... In the old days, every ministry, say Transport, for example, would have their own admins, their own domain software packages etc. Now it's all under one roof, the problem is that they like old school technology. Ie we have to BEG AND PLEAD to use PHP, ruby etc for interfaces for our databases...prettymuch the problem is, the geeks on hand love open source, but the managers for the whole system have their heads firmly planted up their butts. Thats even the reason why they *just* ramped up to vista instead of waiting for win7 because it'd have "unproven performance". Good game, bureaucracy.

No prefered treatment!

[Opportunist]

Giving OSS preferred treatment means that it doesn't win because it's better but just because it got an "unfair" advantage. You'll end up with the same prejudice that many "affirmative action" projects face, claiming that they only got this or that position because of that "unfair" advantage, not on their own merit.

I'm convinced that OSS can "win" on its own. And nobody will be able to claim that the sole reason was preference.

Re:No prefered treatment!

[Stormwatch]

It's not about the best app for a given job, it's about avoiding vendor lock-in. When it comes to government documents, total format openness should be obligatory.

Re:No prefered treatment!

[jonaskoelker]

In some situations, being Open Source is a merit in itself.

Giving preference to Open Source is one way to let that merit influence your decision.

Exactly how much preference Open Source will have (and should have) is open to debate. Is it "all else equals", or is it "unless there's a strong compelling reason not to", or somewhere between?

Re:No prefered treatment!

[erroneus]

Merit is irrelevant. Microsoft has never won on merit alone. They bought their position wilfully and skilfully. That is hardly the issue. It would still be a problem if WordPerfect still ruled the word processor world and Lotus 123 the spreadsheet world. The issue is vendor lock-in.

If file formats are all the same AND COMPATIBLE, then the competing apps vendors will inherently have to compete on merit. You will get your wish. But until such a time that Microsoft stops playing games with their intentional monkey-wrench implementation of ODF, it would be best if everyone moved over to an implementation that DOES use an acceptable and compatible implementation of ODF. Once that happen, then if Microsoft were to try to play in that arena, they would have a harder time playing their old games. Not that they wouldn't try, but the very first time a government document was made available to the public and the applications that people use (something other than Microsoft Office) coughs and says it can't read it, then Microsoft will have to answer to the problem they created. If there is law that says "this government body will use only open and compatible formats" and Microsoft fails, then Microsoft either needs to provide a fix or a refund at that point.

But BEFORE that level and fair playing field can be established, a "standard" needs to be in place first... an open standard. Microsoft has already demonstrated bad faith with their first implementation that will READ all ODF documents just fine... but won't save them in a way that other software can read them. (That is exactly how their lock-in game works.)

Rational behavior

[FilterMapReduce]

They will also consider open-source software on an even footing with proprietary for all new software purchases. [...] Their only criticism was, 'can't you do more?' with one advocating that free and open source software be given preference, not equal footing."

Indeed, it seems irrational that open source software isn't always considered on an even footing, not just in Vancouver but everywhere. Do governments assume that there is some inherent advantage to the source code being kept secret and copyrighted—security through obscurity, perhaps?

And it seems at least as irrational that open source isn't already given preferential treatment on account of its price, which is generally zero. You always hear about governments automatically going with the lowest bidder, even to their own detriment. Yet, when it comes to software, it almost goes without saying that they shell out money for Windows and Office.

Re:Rational behavior

[calmofthestorm]

It's more that governments are slow to react to changes, and it is only in the last 5-10 years that open source software has entered the public consciousness /at all/.

There are a lot of interest groups that want to make it sound like nothing of value is ever free.

Only Criticism...

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

Their only criticism was, 'can't you do more?' with one advocating that free and open source software be given preference, not equal footing."

FOSS shouldn't be given preference. It should be considered using the same criteria as proprietary software: functionality, cost, security, sourcing, etc. Considering that FOSS is generally less expensive than proprietary software, it's already got an advantage that proprietary software will have difficulty overcoming.

Re:Only Criticism...

[Zero__Kelvin]

Well yes and no. One item on a checklist of pros and cons should be "Is it FOSS", since it is a known fact that given the exact same source code it is preferential and beneficial that said source code be open rather than proprietary. So in that one respect, yes, FOSS should be given preference.

Prejudice for freedom is entirely appropriate.

[jbn-o]

A citizen's desire to ensure their freedom is entirely appropriate. With software the only way to do that is to exclusively use free software and open standards. Proprietors aren't stupid; sometimes they write powerful software. But no matter what that software does it is always non-free. Powerful proprietary software has a master, an individual or organization that controls its destiny and thus what the user can do and how the user can do that job. People accustomed to the idea that programs should be decided on certain vaguely-stated values ("their own merit") and not a user's freedom—the freedoms of free software—need to reevaluate their views in light of what public service means. Governments should not be under the thumb of proprietors, no matter how powerful their software. We are better off improving free software to make up for any technical limitations it has so that it can do what citizens need it to do; thus less powerful free software is preferable to more powerful proprietary software.

VMs

[Mathinker]

A lot of your complaints would be solved by saving the rendering software in binary form which runs under an open-source virtual machine like VirtualBox. Then no matter how many formats you want to preserve, you only need to deal with constantly porting the VM to current technological standards.

This idea also helps if, for some reason, you prefer to use a proprietary OS and proprietary formats --- however, in that case you are still more likely to run into some bug (a la Y2K38) which you will be much less able to fix compared to the open-source renderer/format case.

I suppose for something like Y2K38 you could just patch the VM to lie about the date, but that isn't going to help if your use scenario requires current date support.

Re:VMs

[LaskoVortex]

A lot of your complaints would be solved by saving the rendering software in binary form which runs under an open-source virtual machine like VirtualBox.

This doesn't solve the problem of an activation server for the OS. You boot into your VM and it can't activate because the server is non-existent. Any problem you have with open source software is magnified 10X with closed source.

The compiler problem

[symbolset]

This is why the C compiler is required to be able to compile itself to a new target platform. If you're especially paranoid, you store a reference platform with the OS, compiler and compiler source as well as your escrow source. Then no matter how alien computers become, your code and hence your data can survive.

This problem was solved in the 1960's.

It's also why if it doesn't include a compiler and source that can compile both itself and the OS it's not an operating system - it's an operating environment.

Re:FOSS should not get preference

[symbolset]

Vendors lie.