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?

Comments

Who develops it?

[Skinkie]

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.

Re:Who develops it?

[Skinkie]

Considering the following real case. The City of Amsterdam created a new CAD plugin allowing to the export to contain all properties required for a government exchange. Everything they had seen on the market had issues, hence they developed something new. Other municipalities started to use this software, and one of the commercial suppliers of a competing plugin was not amused. Here the government puts in resources to compete with a market activity - even if they completely hate the product - the proper way to solve this is via a tender, which can obviously request all software assets to be available. The currently legislation prevents unfair competition by provision costs, hence the development costs (labor fees of the civil servant) should be balanced over all private users, unless legislation is made to prevent this. For open data this is for example the European Public Sector Information act.

Re:Who develops it?

[Skinkie]

Requiring the work done to be made OSS is unfair to the companies which do not want to do that. (But now allowing small companies to bid on the tender isn't an issue)

The government is allowed to set requirements on what they want to receive, and how they want it be be delivered. So technically speaking they can request a can of developers for 10.000 hours, and want to have a fair price in a tender for that. Or you can ask for a software license to allow you to do this and that. Hence if a solution company does not want to deliver such, they will not participate in the tender, but they have been allowed to participate and with a lot of experience might have been able to do so under a reduced cost (much experience in the field, able to reuse previous work). Less money spend is good for the tax payer. But this would still only be able to be used inside the government. Because there is a limitation a public body could act as a private body by the legislation of competition. Imagine the government buying all ground, developing real estate, there couldn't be any competition. The article is about should government require open source software to be independent of suppliers. There are quite a lot of examples where government software development is not about the next "Office" software but in CAD, geospatial, photogrammetry, simulation, urban planning where this software might benefit others. If the government would build a new OS-kernel we would likely all agree this is stupid, what about a competitor to ArcGIS/QGis?

All IT systems should be using open source softwar

[stooo]

>> Should all government IT systems be using open source software?
All IT systems should be using open source software.

Re:sometimes

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

PROTIP: We are part of "the market" too!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:unrealistic

[gweihir]

That is nonsense. Nonsense often repeated, but still untrue.

if the reason for NOT

[mapkinase]

is security, then that would be just an example of security hy obscurity.

Re:sometimes

[mrvan]

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.

Open data standards and open APIs

[kosmosik]

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.

Re:Open data standards and open APIs

[Anne Thwacks]

In the "olden days" (when NASA was going to the moon) it was common for engineering procurement to require a "second source" - before aerospace would buy anything, there had to be an alternative source.

If you had an invention, you had to licence it to a competitor, or it would not be bought Typically, government procurement would buy from multiple suppliers, quantities in inverse proportion to price, to ensure that multiple suppliers would always be available.

I am not sure when this practice stopped - but it seems that things are no longer done this way - and as a result, we get Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel (or, to use the technical term: "totally shafted").

If that is not the decline and fall of civilization as we know it, I don't know what is.

Re:Yeah but in real life...

[Anne Thwacks]

That implies that the software is simple enough for you to make meaningful changes to it.

I think you missed the point: governments can afford to pay for a team with the necessary skills to maintain the open source software in the manner that most benefits them. However, they only need pay once.

With closed source, they need to pay through the nose possibly repeatedly for different departments, and still don't get what they want.

However, this does require a degree of sanity in government, and I am not holding my breath on that account.

Re:sometimes

[nine-times]

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.

Re:sometimes

[i.r.id10t]

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.

Open Standards are the most important part.

[biggaijin]

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.

Re:All IT systems should be using open source soft

[drinkypoo]

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.