A bunch of granola chewing hippies freedom loving technologists sent a letter to President Obama, encouraging him to consider open source software. Signed by representatives from Novell, Red Hat, Unisys, and a bunch of other open source solutions companies, the letter is well-written piece of advocacy. Of course, not everyone supports the initiative.
The Register pooh-poohs the notion of open source advocates contacting President Obama, calling it “toothless”.
If open source is going to make any real headway in the government, there needs to be an incentive to choose it, not a rule. Time and again, this is where the open source community falls short: Quality code isn’t enough of an incentive. You can put the best engineering in the world into your product, but if you don’t know how to market, your project will rot in the source repository.
So wait a tick — these open source advocates are doing exactly that: marketing their products, and yet they’re still doing it wrong? The U.S. Federal Government is an insanely complicated beast, so it’s unlikely that open source software alone can fix all that’s wrong with the government. But then, I didn’t get the impression from the letter that that was what was being advocated. I got the impression that open source should be considered in general, as part of a comprehensive decision making process. In those instances where open source software makes sense, its use should be strongly considered.
A couple choice quotes from the original letter, for your consideration:
Open-source software brings transparency to software development. There are no “black boxes” in open-source software and therefore no need to guess what is going on “behind the scenes.” Ultimately, this means a better product for everyone, because there is visibility at every level of the application, from the user interface to the data implementation. Furthermore, open-source software provides for platform independence, which makes quick deployments that benefit our citizens much easier and realistic.
A lot of people have expressed dissatisfaction with the closed-source, black-box electronic voting machines being rolled out across the country by Diebold, Sequoia, and others. Here’s one area where a critical evaluation of open source solutions against the status quo might make a demonstrable improvement. I’m not saying that we should blindly deploy open source electronic voting solutions — we shouldn’t blindly deploy anything — but government would do well to serve its citizens by evaluating the alternatives.
We want to encourage you to find ways for states and agencies to collaborate together on solutions that ultimately are better than the sum of all the individual efforts combined and at much lower cost to each participant. Open-source software encourages this type of collaboration by making the results of previous successful efforts available to others with similar goals and needs.
That’s a pretty good idea, no? How many systems throughout the government can’t speak to one another because they were designed behind closed doors by different companies? Again, a full-scale switch to open source software isn’t going to be a cure-all for complexity, incompatibilities, and conflicting requirements; but surely there must be at least some systems used by the government that would benefit from a transition to open source software. As the need arises to replace those systems, why not consider open source software?
I frankly don’t expect President Obama to give a damn about open source software in particular, but hopefully he passes the letter off to the appropriate people within his administration who will care, and be in a position to consider the merits of the suggestion.
The main problem is that in most categories, open source software just flat out falls source in terms of being compared to their closed source rivals or compatibility.
People only seem to factor in the cost of not purchasing closed source software, never considering the cost of implementation, training, and matinence of such software, especially the switch over from a closed source system. They only seem to factor in the cost of buying software that the majority already have expirence with and use.
Open Source software in general is far more difficult to use than it’s closed source counterparts and far too fragmented.
You think its annoying that Windows 7 will have about 6 versions? (Although honestly the average consumer will only really see about two). Enjoy choosing from the literally hundreds of Linux distributions…. good luck getting everybody to agree on one and which desktop manager to use, as well as making sure everything works.
If they really want to reduce costs, make it transparent, and make ti easy for everyone to use like they claim, then sticking with the currently implemented closed source system would be the way to do this, not starting over with a closed source system that is anything BUT transparent and usually lacks support for half your hardware, editing config files for hours is not what most people consider transparent.
If you’re thinking solely of “Linux on the government desktop” then I’d be mostly inclined to agree with you, with a few specific caveats.
But there are gobs of special-purpose systems operating within the government. These closed-source systems might not have any support if the original manufacturer closes shop, which might require a full-blown bid process on a replacement system. If those kinds of systems can be implemented using open source software, any number of capable developers can review the code and make updates or improvements.
The DoD has been using open source software for a long time:
http://www.forbes.com/2003/06/20/cz_eb_0620linux.html
And they’ve recently set up their own software repository:
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=347
(This was news to me, too. Cool!)
The NSA wrote most of the Security Enhanced Linux extensions which are now widely adopted.
http://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/
Research labs use open source software.
There’s a lot more to open source software than just “Linux on the desktop”.
Over the long term, I believe it to be the case that open source software can successfully drive down support costs. A contract might be awarded to a systems developer/integrator to design and implement a specific package. If that contractor later closes shop, or if they’re found to be in violation of the terms of the contract, another developer/integrator can be hired to maintain the existing system. The replacement will have access to the source, and minimize disruption in operations.
No, this won’t work in every situation, but neither am I advocating the wholesale adoption of open source software across all segments of the government. As I said in the post, I think the administration — federal, as well as state and local — would do well to consider open source software in general in order to identify those areas where it can provide specific benefits.
No, I was not purely just thinking of Linux.
Unless every programmer strictly follows standards, eventually down the line it will be difficult to follow the code and possibly easier to just start over.
I also can’t see the government allowing somebody to developer something in closed-source for them, thats like the government agreeing somebody to build a state of the art facility and not monitering the building at all in case he slips in a backdoor.
If president Obama didn’t cared about open source, why then ask for a white paper on the subject?
Implementation costs? Make it so the next reinstall of Windows is now an installation of Linux.
Training? The costs would be comparable to those of implementing Office 2007 because it too requires training. As for the OS, there could be an initiative to create a standard System Configuration Tool (Control Center or whatever) that would let you jump from distro to distro. Plus, when 7 arrives, people will also need training, don’t you think (especially if the point of departure is XP).
Maintenance cost? Surely you jest! Imagine the costs of maintenance going down simply by not needing as much antivirus software as you need today.
Making systems speak to each other? Think Yahoo! Pipes and you’ll get how easier it would be to communicate between agencies or branches.
Most importantly though is the fact that American Workers will be encouraged to participate on this, no doubt, creating a wealth of job opportunities.
“Implementation costs? Make it so the next reinstall of Windows is now an installation of Linux.”
This is exactly what I spoke against, people who think implementation cost is nothing more than the cost of not buying Windows.
Let’s just ignore the costs of implenenting a new system, porting over to finding new applications to replace the windows-only ones, converting any documents not compatible with the open source versions of an app, training people to use the new os, downtime, configuration, etc etc shall we?
Clearly the ONLY implementation cost is not buying Windows…. riiiiight…
Windows and Office are in heavy use in the majority of both home and office systems, chances are anybody who signs up for a job working with systems already knows how to use them. Linux completely operated differently, and requires far far more complex knowledge to skillfully operate, or fix anything that goes wrong.
And if there has not been an incentive yet in the Linux community to make it standard to have apps work form distro to distro then there would already be one. The government isn’t magically going to make such a thing possible. Face it, Linux is fragmented.
Imagine the matinence cost of constantly fixing something that breaks down in Linux and having to hire a coder to change the source because you can’t use your contract with Microosft or Sun or whoever to get them to fix it for free.
Your thinking is far too wishful and whymsical, as well as ignores anything negative with Linux.
Show me one “Linux worked perfectly for me” story and I will show you 25 “Linux didn’t work with anything” stories for each one.
“Imagine the matinence cost of constantly fixing something that breaks down in Linux and having to hire a coder to change the source because you can’t use your contract with Microosft or Sun or whoever to get them to fix it for free.”
You’re making the assumption that only private, one-man programming shops will can or will provide support for Linux. It’s a fun argument to make, but it’s a false one. Red Hat, Novell, IBM, and plenty of other companies have the capacity to provide support on the solutions they sell.
Certainly, embracing open source is embracing the latest in technology.
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