[PLUG] Linux in government ... still
Rich Shepard
rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Thu Oct 23 18:54:02 UTC 2003
---------- Forwarded message ----------
SuitWatch--October 23
Views on Linux in Business
--by Doc Searls, Senior Editor of Linux Journal
The third item is an October 19 Associated Press story:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/144617_source20.html by Justin
Pope. Pope writes about the growing number of governments making
open-source and open standards a policy for purchase and
implementation of new technology. Making current news is Eric Kriss,
Massachusetts' administration and finance secretary, who told the
state's CTO to adopt exactly that policy when spending the state's $80
million annual technology budget.
And Massachusetts isn't alone. According to the story, the Initiative
for Software Choice:
http://softwarechoice.org "has tracked 70 different open-source
reference proposals in 24 countries". And that organization is hardly
friendly to open source. According to the Asian Open Source Centre:
http://www.asiaosc.org/enwiki/page/Initiative_for_Software_Choice.html
:
The so-called Initiative for Software Choice is an organization
funded by a large international group of (mostly proprietary)
software companies. These companies typically have a vested
interest in the continuation of the proprietary software model. The
organization's strategy is to put pressure on any government body
that proposes open-source or free software be used in preference to
proprietary software.
The Software Choice part of the name can be considered to mean "we
don't mind if you have the choice between proprietary and free or
open-source software, but your government never should try to
influence you away from proprietary software."
The Software Choice Policy Tracker link is broken, as are about half
of the links on the front page of the site. One that isn't broken
brings up a .pdf version of a letter addressed to Mitt Romney,
Governor of Massachusetts. It begins:
The Initiative for Software Choice (ISC, www.softwarechoice.org) --
a global coalition with over 260 software companies and
associations -- is writing to express our concern that the open
source software mandate recently announced by Secretary of
Administration and Finance, Eric Kriss would incalculably harm
Massachusetts public administration, its citizens, and its
information technology (IT) industry and workers because it will
eviscerate software choice presently available to the Commonwealth
of Massachusetts. As a result, the ISC -- which is managed by the
Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA, which
represents 13,350 member companies including over 175 IT companies
in Massachusetts) -- requests a meeting with your [sic] or your
designee at your earliest convenience so that we may learn more
about this policy and provide our input.
The ISC strongly supports the development and adoption of all kinds
of software: be it open source software (OSS), hybrid or
proprietary. For this reason, we believe that mandatory government
regulations, which give preference to certain kinds of software,
weaken the overall software marketplace, biasing the choice of
viable software options available to public authorities. Only when
all software options are available can the specific needs of each
IT project be met, driven by a flexible range of factors such as
cost, reliability, security, functionality and availability. The
ISC is aware of no barriers to unfettered software choice in
Massachusetts. In fact, at this present time, the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts can rightfully choose any type of software/platform
it wants for its IT needs. As such, no legal obstacles stop its
public administrators from going into the market and getting the
best solution for a given challenge.
The ISC is laying out a bit of a red herring here. That's because in
many states technology often, by law or standard practice, is
obtainable officially only through a procurement process that respects
vendors as the only legitimate technology sources. In other words, you
can only buy software and then only from vendors. As Tom Adelstein
explained in his Linux Access in State and Local Government series:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6990 on the Linux Journal
site, work needs to be done at several different levels to open
government to open-source procurement, whether the goods have any
costs or come from vendors. A list of virtues involved in this process
is provided by Bruce Perens through his Sincere Choice:
http://www.sincerechoice.org effort, created in response to the
Software Choice initiative.
What gets lost here, on both sides of the argument, is that the terms
proprietary and open source are neither opposite nor mutually
exclusive. Take MySQL:
http://www.mysql.com/ for example. The company fact sheet makes the
matter plain:
MySQL's company values and business strategy hinge on the open
source software philosophy that software should be free and
available to all. MySQL owns all rights to the MySQL server source
code, the MySQL trademark and the mysql.com domain worldwide.
Through this copyright, the company protects MySQL's integrity and
reputation as a fully open source, superior database....
MySQL's business strategy leverages the MySQL name and copyright as
well as the company's deep expertise in the MySQL database
software. The company's revenues are driven by the sale of
commercial licenses, as well as strategic partnerships, consulting,
customer support and other services. Commercial Licenses: MySQL
employs a dual-licensing business model. The MySQL database is
available at no cost under the GPL free software/open source
license, and MySQL also provides commercial, non-GPL licenses to
organizations that don't want to be bound by the GPL.
With the availability of the commercial license option, leading
companies are now using the high-performance MySQL database without
the limitations of the GPL in the enterprise, as well as embedding
MySQL with major software, hardware and other electronic devices.
MySQL's dual-licensing structure supports its open source user
community with a sustainable business model, and this community, in
turn, is the engine behind the company's commercial business.
In other words, it's free as in beer and speech, under the GPL; and
yet it is completely owned and therefore proprietary. This means the
company also is free to charge you for a license if you want the goods
and services that come with that license and as long as what you do
with those goods and services remains private and outside the scope of
the GPL. This covers a lot of possibilities.
MySQL's explosive success completely invalidates the beliefs that
ownership and freedom are mutually exclusive and that you need
restrictive licenses if you hope to make something valuable enough to
sell. Scarcity and value are not tied to each other after all. Why
make matters complicated for everybody? Expose your code, turn it
free, let the world improve on it and sell the results in the form of
software SKUs and paid relationships with customers of all sizes. Have
it both ways, and then some.
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