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NYC Councilman (and Open Source Developer) Submits Bill Establishing Open Source

Posted by timothy on from the say-fellas-we-could-give-the-money-back dept.

NewYorkCountryLawyer (912032) writes "New York City Council Member Ben Kallos (KallosEsq), who also happens to be a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developer, just introduced legislation to mandate a government preference for FOSS and creating a Civic Commons website to facilitate collaborative purchasing of software. He argues that NYC could save millions of dollars with the Free and Open Source Software Preferences Act 2014, pointing out that the city currently has a $67 million Microsoft ELA. Kallos said: 'It is time for government to modernize and start appreciating the same cost savings as everyone else.'"

7 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Well, by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 4, Funny

    I guess we should be glad there are no Visual Basic programmers on the City Council.

  2. I'd be satisfied with... by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'd be satisfied with a preference for whatever actually works for the given requirement, for the least amount of money. FOSS, proprietary, whatever.

    1. Re:I'd be satisfied with... by Ichijo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Evaluate software not just on purchasing/licensing costs but also on the cost of installing the software, migrating old documents, and training users, and the time required to complete day-to-day tasks. Because sometimes FOSS is only free if your time is worth nothing.

      And require open standards.

      --
      Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
    2. Re:I'd be satisfied with... by oodaloop · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Sure. As long as the same is done with Windows. We went from XP to 7 and every edition of Office with no training. In those cases, we all taught ourselves and each other informally. I taught myself Ubuntu at home, so it can be done. Let's just compare apples to apples.

      --
      Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
  3. Re:This is bullshit. by Githaron · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I would argue that having any government move to open source is good for everyone. I don't know if it will be cheaper but I do think it will like give the people more bang for their buck. Instead of those dollars going into one person's pockets, they can not only still be used to solve the government's software problems but also provide software libraries and frameworks for other to bulid off of.

  4. How About We Make it Mature? by mx+b · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Open standards is extremely important. I'd hate for all that data to be locked into Microsoft Excel format, or what have you.

    While I agree that sometimes the FOSS is buggy or missing features, I do not think in this situation we should let that stop us. In fact, I would love to see NYC (and other cities across the country) agree to sponsor/contract a couple of developers each to work on whatever we need: data formatting and conversion, word processing, accounting, voting software, etc. In this way, while the FOSS is maybe not up to spec today, we can all work together on making it up to spec soon. In this way, we all pool resources, get it done correctly ONCE*, and enjoy the savings and philosophical warm and fuzzies.

    (* yes I understand that long term we would probably need to continually hire developers on a contract basis to fix problems that come up, or add new features or support for new operating systems, etc., but generally speaking it would be much less impact on the budget long term -- though I also understand the political pressure currently to cut budgets rather than spend a little extra for a perk down the road.).

  5. Consider incidentals by l2718 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Taxpayers should not be paying for someone's pet cause ... Proper action would be to mandate the government to use the best software for the task at hand ... Let the technical merits decide.

    I'm sorry, but while technical merits should be paramount, they are not the only consideration. Public contracting is not an exact science, and it is entirely appropriate to have non-technical considerations tip the scales in close cases. So while Free Software should not be mandatory, legislating a preference for it makes perfect sense.

    Furthermore, there are considerations beyond the needs of a specific project and tender. Free Software has an externality: when the government (as a customer) requests modifications and improvements (and pays for them to be created), everyone benefits. For example, when my university has Blackboard Inc fix a bug (or improve the software) only Blackboard captures the value (when they sell their software to the next customre). If we were using Moodle, every other Moodle user would automatically benefit. Had we opted for Moodle, we'd also benefit from fixes made by other universities.