Apparently Scott McNealy of Sun (JAVA), not sensing the Obama administration’s urgency on the matter, is late with his white paper on open source software in government. Or perhaps other information technology (IT) executives who were not asked to submit a white paper felt they needed to play catch-up. Either way, in these troubled economic times with people losing jobs and homes, it is disturbing to see some software-company executives try to manipulate both the U.S. government and the open source culture with an “Open Letter to Obama” that is really just incomplete and unsubstantiated advertising.
I don’t believe enterprise or open source software has a nationality. But it is a fact that IT users worldwide and particularly in the U.S. are for open choice in software, not open source, in the good old fashioned red-white-blue sense of the words. And the developers of all types of software we use in the U.S. are as diverse ethnically and in terms of national heritage as the USA is.
To a very small extent some American and worldwide IT users will only deploy open-source-licensed software just the way some people will only drink French wine or wear Italian shoes. That’s their right. But overwhelmingly IT in U.S. enterprises chooses whatever technology it takes to get the job done most cost effectively. Private-sector IT in the U.S. has not needed government mandates like the ones suggested by these software-company executives. The U.S. government does not need mandates either. Such mandates would be a prescription for more economic problems.
IT chose Linux over proprietary versions of UNIX developed by IBM (IBM), Sun and others because Linux did a better job (and IBM—but not Sun—quickly figured out this was a good way to hold down R&D expenses). IT chose the Apache HTTP web server over the Netscape server at the beginning of the Internet revolution because Apache did a better job (and IBM, Oracle (ORCL) and others gave it away with their middleware). Similarly IT chose IBM transaction processing software from the UK, SAP R/3 software from Germany, Business Objects business intelligence software from France, Microsoft Office software from Washington state, Oracle database software from California—all leaders in their categories and all developed by companies based all over the world—because the products get the job done, not because of their license restrictions or software-engineering organizational structure or manipulation of the political system.
All of these products have good user interfaces, well implemented data structures and are platform independent (depending on what the authors of the open letter to Obama mean by that paragraph). How they were licensed has made no difference to how they help businesses be more cost effective and be better suppliers to consumers and other businesses.
IT has embraced open source-developed software for its functionality not its politics. There is no place for political posturing in the software market. It would be catastrophic to see the U.S. fall into European style IT development where governments dictate what developers work on, and preordain who will buy the product, by mandating that the government will only buy certain types of products, however that “typing” is done.
Obama has taken "Buy America" out of the stimulus package. Let's hope he doesn't put "Buy advertising slogans" into it.
-- Dennis Byron
The reference to "European style IT development where governments dictate what developers work on" is a canard.
There are very few (if any) national governments in Europe that mandate open source. There are plenty that encourage its use for public projects in order to lower costs and encourage collaboration among public sector organisations and encourage local industry.
As covered here http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2008/11/26/open-source-and-the-european-commission/ the European Commission (for example) does not have a religious or political view on software licensing but open source software development and collaboration between member states is seen as a means by which the competitiveness of the European Union’s ICT industry can be improved.
Even then, the EC has no way of mandating what software development practices are used in the private sector but it does dictate terms over the software that it pays for. The use of open source is encouraged (not mandated) where "a clear benefit can be expected" while is is preferred where public facing system are being built to ensure that individuals are not required to use software from a single supplier to communicate with the EC.
The Open Letter doesn't seem that different to me. The authors talk of making it mandatory "to consider the source of an application solution (open or closed) as part of the government’s technology acquisition process" not of making open source mandatory.
Similarly they talk of finding "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" and point out that "Open-source software encourages this type of collaboration".
I'll leave the quastion as to whether open source is socialist or not to someone else.
Posted by: Matthew Aslett | February 10, 2009 at 09:30 AM