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Should All Government IT Systems Be Using Open Source Software? (linuxjournal.com)
Writing at Linux Journal, Glyn Moody reports that dozens of government IT systems are switching to open source software.
"The fact that this approach is not already the norm is something of a failure on the part of the Free Software community..." One factor driving this uptake by innovative government departments is the potential to cut costs by avoiding constant upgrade fees. But it's important not to overstate the "free as in beer" element here. All major software projects have associated costs of implementation and support. Departments choosing free software simply because they believe it will save lots of money in obvious ways are likely to be disappointed, and that will be bad for open source's reputation and future projects.
Arguably as important as any cost savings is the use of open standards. This ensures that there is no lock-in to a proprietary solution, and it makes the long-term access and preservation of files much easier. For governments with a broader responsibility to society than simply saving money, that should be a key consideration, even if it hasn't been in the past.... Another is transparency. Recently it emerged that Microsoft has been gathering personal information from 300,000 government users of Microsoft Office ProPlus in the Netherlands, without permission and without documentation.
He includes an inspiring quote from the Free Software Foundation Europe about code produced by the government: "If it is public money, it should be public code as well. But when it comes to the larger issue about the general usage of proprietary vs. non-proprietary software -- what do Slashdot's readers think?
Should all government IT systems be using open source software?
"The fact that this approach is not already the norm is something of a failure on the part of the Free Software community..." One factor driving this uptake by innovative government departments is the potential to cut costs by avoiding constant upgrade fees. But it's important not to overstate the "free as in beer" element here. All major software projects have associated costs of implementation and support. Departments choosing free software simply because they believe it will save lots of money in obvious ways are likely to be disappointed, and that will be bad for open source's reputation and future projects.
Arguably as important as any cost savings is the use of open standards. This ensures that there is no lock-in to a proprietary solution, and it makes the long-term access and preservation of files much easier. For governments with a broader responsibility to society than simply saving money, that should be a key consideration, even if it hasn't been in the past.... Another is transparency. Recently it emerged that Microsoft has been gathering personal information from 300,000 government users of Microsoft Office ProPlus in the Netherlands, without permission and without documentation.
He includes an inspiring quote from the Free Software Foundation Europe about code produced by the government: "If it is public money, it should be public code as well. But when it comes to the larger issue about the general usage of proprietary vs. non-proprietary software -- what do Slashdot's readers think?
Should all government IT systems be using open source software?
Recently a Gartner report on open source in The Netherlands made an interesting case why with the current legislation the Dutch (and likely European) governments could not contribute to open source software. Governments may use it, but a software developer disguised as civil servant must never be provide patches or features back to the open source project, nor is the government allowed to publish their work in public, publication should be strictly limited to other governments. This would be prohibited due to unfair competition with software suppliers that build closed source software not having the advantage of government support. Now the case of no-vender-lockin still remains, but unless we first change these kind of laws, harnessing the true power of open source: collaboration, is legally not possible.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
>> Should all government IT systems be using open source software?
All IT systems should be using open source software.
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The problem is that government systems tend to handle all kinds of really important information, and proprietary vendors have shown over the years over and over again that they simply are not trustworthy, and that the people responsible are not up to par WRT keeping them safeguarded.
Evidence? The massive hits by ransomware against various types of government agencies ranging from the NHS to the Alaskan administration, the latter I believe got hit so bad they were considering reverting to typewriters. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of the continual data leakage we never get to hear about.
Making sure the systems run on verifiable code were you don't have to trust external parties should be the starting point for every state run system. That would be intelligent spending. The government has a lot of information on all of us, and by collecting it it also collects the responsibility to protect it. Something which just isn't possible with proprietary software, Microsoft's latest offerings in particular.
Open standards yes, since you avoid lock in. Open source maybe. Does it save money over the long term?
"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute."
This isn't a question of efficiency. It's a question being able to know 100% what the government is doing. There are proprietary breathalysers that sent people to prison and then turned out to be buggy. The manufacturers wouldn't let people see their source code so the defendants will often have never found out about this. If your town is not having it's road built because the Office356 regression function has a bug you will never be able to see that.
For democratic control you need both open (so you can see inside) and free (so you can test it) software.
Yeah, the commercial offers sucked. And the market decided. For a better product and a better deal. Made by the "corporation" called "government", which is the "corporation" that we're all shareholders, employers and employees of.
The commercial suppliers simply hated an actual free market (and especially it balancing itself out). Like apparently all corporations and businesses without exception always do. Because they prefer unfair competition, but only if it's them doing it, e.g. in the form of a monopoly (even imaginary ones on imaginary property).
I think in the long run, FLOSS will win over all closed-source software. As an egoistical sole company simply cannot compete with everyone teaming up to make something free and libre. It's why social species succeed over everyone-for-himself species. And the imaginary property delusion won't last forever. People are gonna want to only pay for actual work, not for mere copies or mere profit, since they had to actually work for their money too. They only don't right now, because they have no choice, and because those who steal their money wrote laws and propaganda that became the cultural norm in some sad parts of this planet.
That is nonsense. Nonsense often repeated, but still untrue.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And this "unfair competition" doctrine is the result of years (decennia!) of neoliberal lobbying. Why should be a government be prohibited to do what's best for its citizens and cater first to corporations which, in return try to avoid taxes as "cleverly" as they can?
I mean: corporations /can/ be the government's allies in fostering the citizen's well-being, but they can be also its enemies. It should be up to the government to decide when and how.
Lobbyists should be scrutinized much more closely. IMO half of them should be in jail, along with the politicians listening to them (the latter are worse).
One forgotten cost when using open source software is support. Every time an open source project adds or removes features it prompts a surge in support requests from users. Firefox is one example. When Firefox removed support for legacy add-ons everyone wanted to know how to replace their lost functionality. The removal of bookmark descriptions instead of just limiting their size caused another rash of questions. The removal of the Never Check for Updates means that every user is nagged to update to the newest version before it can be tested and rolled out in a controlled manner. Multiply these kind of problems to other OSS products for document processing, PDF, compression, graphic editing, multimedia playback, etc. and the support costs grow greatly.
Another problem with OSS is who do you call for tech support. Most OSS products have limited support for enterprise level problems. Many software packages STILL require a user to run in administrator mode to work properly. Saving user preferences in the Program Files area still happens in some software. Every software package that displays the infamous UAC warning will cause support problems in a managed system. Software packages that use the Windows Temp folder for some intermediate file use will be blocked by some anti-malware software. Who does a company contact to fix these types of problems? To be fair, some of these problems are still present in proprietary software.
Part of the appeal of OSS is the price; however, most people forget that part of the cost of retail software is the built-in cost of maintaining a support center, normally with a 1-800 number for question, or at least a knowledge base system to reduce the cost of support phone calls.
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is security, then that would be just an example of security hy obscurity.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
... you have a piece of software that doesn't work. You call in the highly expensive support from the vendor and they won't be able to do much more than shrug at it. It's something I have seen at large companies and very large vendors.
"Free Software" means that you can change the software if you please. That implies that the software is simple enough for you to make meaningful changes to it. The simpler the software the more reliable and secure it usually becomes, that's why when hardening a system you throw out stuff you don't need. If you don't have your own staff understanding vital systems, you have done something severely wrong.
I see the same in higher education. There's a number of things we all need (like an electronic learning environment) but we buy it from vendors like Canvas or Blackboard, which is expensive and inflexible. Same for grading systems, scheduling, course guides, human resource, etc.
I think we should have moved to a cooperative structure for these things long ago and all pay into a group that develops the software and then releases it open source. Since this can be decided at the university system level there's less risk of freeriding, and since universities employ a lot of smart people who like tinkering there will be a lot of community contributions.
No.
Public/government IT systems should use open data standards and open APIs so that data is not tied to one vendors system.
Having that you can use whatever licensed software that does the job and is economically viable.
If you need the source code to find an exploit, just give up, kid. The black hat doesn't fit you.
You don't have to trust an open source project, especially not when you have the resources of a national state behind you. It's all out there in the open, you don't have to take anyone's word for anything. All it takes is the actual will to shore things up.
Nobody said you should use any open source project for anything without vetting it. Remember, we're talking about governments here, different ballpark.
OpenSSL.
node.js last year
PEAR this year
Open Source also has some fairly substantial supply chain security problems. The delivery model, and update cadence can also be pretty terrible.
The requirements of using something at home are vastly different than for the government, and scale becomes an issue. Your either paying a closed source vendor to manage this, or your bloating the size of your IT team and paying for it that way.
Using open source to save money is a myth.
Honestly, I've come to think that's a bit of a cop-out. If the government can't use FOSS, then I think they should fund the software they need, which should then also be open source.
That may sound excessive, but it's an investment. It accomplishes a bunch of stuff. First, over the long term, it does away with licensing costs. It also allows them to access the source code and verify its security, and then make modifications as needed. Also very importantly, it frees them from proprietary interests. They're not beholden to do things the way their vendor wants and serving their vendor's interests.
Also, whatever improvements they make to the FOSS are likely to be needed somewhere else. Improving public software serves the public interest.
The reality is, buying proprietary software may be "efficient" when looking at the short-term immediate cost, but it's much harder to say what will be efficient and cheap when viewed over the next several decades. I suspect that investing in public software now will pay off several times over in the next 50 years, and that's the sort of timeline the government should be considering.
Except Canvas is AGPL licensed.
https://github.com/instructure...
Sure, you'll loose those nice integrations with Big Blue Button (conferences tool), some of the Speed Grader stuff, the equation editor, the "record from webcam" function in the HTML editor, etc. since those are licensed services or hosted via 3rd party contracts, but you can also replace them yourself.
Strangely, what the college I work for pays for Canvas hosting and support (not a license fee) is about what we paid Angel/Blackboard for license and hosting, but the software is better and our support experience is better AND we get a LOT more resources.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Yes, universities need student worker jobs for experience, research grant funding to try out new ideas in support software, longer term planning which requires investing instead of short term cloud fees.
But governments which exist as a representation of the collective... is deeply aligned with the shared public work that open source is; with the biggest difference being it has an organized management with funding, power and the overhead of safe guards. That power and funding are what brings about most it's political problems... Sadly, the corruption and failing to fight against marketing/lobbying but in the USA, the increasingly anti-social culture is the main reason we do not collectively take on any new pubic works.
Open source projects are so unorganized, volatile, unpredictable it deters adoption and isn't enough to counter the close-minded thinking it is wrong for collective works to replace privatized services.
I do not think a national highway system could be built today. Obvious new public work projects that in the past would have easily been done have had trouble getting serious consideration. Such as, an information super highway... public health insurance, public healthcare, public car insurance, legalized co-operative insurance (illegal in some places...like public ISP are illegal too,) free college (high school wasn't free either until everybody needed it.) public recycling, trash, electricity.... or what everybody would lke: automatic TAX preparation by the IRS... which was proven cheaper but lobbyists killed that off.
I've worked with local governments. They do have plenty of lazy workers. I've worked consulting too; they have just as many lazy workers but those are forced a bit more in my view. It comes down to management in each. The main difference is that the public employees care MORE than the private employee (especially now with the lack of loyalty to workers.) Public workers have at least tiny bit more loyalty to their community/country if not a lot more. Many of the poor ones I run into and explore out of curiosity actually cared too much and the dysfunction of the system crushed their spirit too much. This one is most easy to see in the ones who quit their careers as cops/teachers etc. and the ones who are still plugging along are in the middle ground. If we stopped hating on our public institutions (like Russia wants and has been doing since the cold war... you ignorant Americans haven't got a clue! ) these people would be far more productive and happy.
It seriously offends me when I download something from a government Web site and discover that I cannot read it without buying a copy of Microsoft Word or some other proprietary software. It is not my government's job to guarantee Microsoft a market for their products.
But government is all about the next election, like business is all about the next quarter. Wise investing is ancient history.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Windows is not open source, but users and developers are cheaper.
You're ignoring the cost of running Windows. Not just the up front costs, but the maintenance costs, and the lost opportunity costs when closed source makes something difficult or impractical.
I'd rather not pay the taxes needed to support all OSS.
OSS supports YOU at the same time you support IT. It's not all outlay, you get the software back, and you get improvements from others.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"