The Open Road

The U.S. military is no laggard when it comes to open-source software adoption, but apparently thinks it can do better. The U.S. Department of Defense on Tuesday issued new guidelines designed to remove roadblocks to open-source adoption, arguing that open source can help the Defense Department "anticipate new threats and respond to continuously changing requirements."

And to think open-source software like Linux used to be considered a threat to secure Defense Department systems.

While Department of Defense CIO David Wennergren's revised guidance (PDF) is not intended to create new policy, it does provide clarity that suggests open source is very welcome at the Defense Department.

Apparently, the Defense Department's guidance on open source, issued in 2003, wasn't resulting in as much uptake as the CIO desired.

Hence, the new guidance specifies that open-source software meets internal purchasing requirements for "commercial computer software," and as such gets statutory preference in purchasing decisions, just like software from Oracle, Microsoft, or others.

But the guidance goes beyond neutrality to suggest reasons that open-source software might be better than such alternatives, including:

1. The continuous and broad peer-review enabled by publicly available source code supports software reliability and security efforts through the identification and elimination of defects that might otherwise go unrecognized by a more limited core development team.
2. The unrestricted ability to modify software source code enables the Department to respond more rapidly to changing situations, missions, and future threats.
3. Reliance on a particular software developer or vendor due to proprietary restrictions may be reduced by the use of OSS, which can be operated and maintained by multiple vendors, thus reducing barriers to entry and exit....
4. Since OSS typically does not have a per-seat licensing cost, it can provide a cost advantage in situations where many copies of the software may be required, and can mitigate risk of cost growth due to licensing in situations where the total number of users may not be known in advance...
5. OSS is particularly suitable for rapid prototyping and experimentation, where the ability to "test drive" the software with minimal costs and administrative delays can be important.

Ultimately, the Defense Department CIO leaves it to individuals to determine which software best meets Defense Department requirements in a given scenario, but the memo hardly reads like neutral guidance. This is consistent with a wise policy of preferences, not mandates, for open source.

It's also an indication of much more Defense Department open-source adoption to come.

(As an aside, special thanks to John Scott for alerting me to this news, and for his work with the Defense Department to help this happen.)

Open source can save governments and enterprises tremendous amounts of money--but not always. Lower cost is not always the primary driver for IT deceptions. That's why policies of preference for open source, not mandates, make sense.

Open-source mandates have always seemed like a terrible idea to me, just as mandates to use proprietary software are. When a problem demands the turn of a screw, you don't want to be clobbering it with a hammer.

The Dutch police force understands this, which is why it has explicitly decided to prefer open source in IT purchasing, but to not use open source exclusively.

This is a sound, pragmatic approach to information technology, one that an increasing array of organizations are embracing.

Even so, sometimes our open-source aspirations fall short of reality. For example, the Symbian Foundation, the organization behind the open-source Symbian project, says it favors "open source wherever possible," yet it lists few open-source projects actually powering its IT infrastructure.

Perhaps its desire for software as a service trumped its interest in open-source software?

It's very possible. As stated above, cost, which generally favors open source, is not always the compelling differentiator.

Sometimes, however, cost weighs so heavily in open source's favor that a refusal to use open source demands an answer.

As reported on Slashdot, for example, the auditor-general of Canada's Ontario province issued a report indicating that the government wasted about a billion dollars on an electronic system for medical records when a credible open-source alternative existed, one that was already in use within the province.

A policy of preference for open-source software might well have averted such apparent waste of taxpayer dollars.

Preferences retain flexibility to fit the right tool for the job, while still encouraging open-source adoption. Mandates, like any form of coercion, tend to breed rebellion.

Just ask government IT employees throughout Latin America. During my last trip to Argentina and Brazil, I spoke with system integrators who specialize in open-source software. I asked them if their work with government organizations had become easier since those governments had passed legislation favoring open source.

Nope. In fact, the opposite seems to have occurred, as employees have dug in their heels to avoid being forced to deploy software that may be a mismatch for either their skills or the IT problems at hand. One comment I heard: "It's one thing to legislate and quite another to enforce."

Open source doesn't need mandates to succeed. It's growing explosively, and adoption is widespread. Preferences can help that, but mandates arguably won't.

The open-source community has a long tradition of looking for and hounding away at the very thought of Microsoft influence from government IT policies.

For example, Open Source Initiative President Michael Tiemann rightly decries an alleged tie between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's charitable donations and Microsoft's "cabinet-level access to inform policy."

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (red fedora) and Michael Tiemann

(Credit: Ricardo Stuckert)

Apparently, however, Tiemann has no problem proudly displaying a picture of Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, wearing a Red Hat fedora, declaring...

Would that all Presidents and all ministers of all countries were so concerned about the sovereignty of their nation and the fiduciary care of their people!

...that they'd openly stand behind one vendor? That doesn't sound much like a sovereign act to me.

In fact, it sounds exactly like the sort of bias that the open-source community routinely inveighs against. Imagine the outcry if President Lula would have been seen posing with Bill Gates, wearing a Microsoft t-shirt?

Mark Taylor, president of the U.K.'s Open Source Consortium, lashed out against the U.K. government "pay(ing) lip service" to open source while "actually pursuing policies that are exclusive." Presumably it would be better if those "exclusive" policies actually favored a particular open-source vendor or technology?

That seems to be the message coming out of Europe, too, in its proposed policy changes around the purchase of standards-based technologies, which some suggest amounts to a built-in bias for open source. Policies that promote openness, generally, are good, because they help to protect a country's sovereign interests.

But when a country's leaders are seen to be supporting a particular vendor, even a vendor of open source and open standards, that strikes me as just the sort of favoritism that we disparage when the beneficiary is Microsoft. Just because it's bias in our favor doesn't make it right.

Back to Brazil. Sun Microsystems' Simon Phipps also posted pictures of President Lula wearing the Red Hat fedora, but also a Sun Java ring. (The president apparently said it made him feel like "James Bond.") At least Java is a technology, not a vendor, which makes this act of Lula less...loony.

Simon Phipps and Lula show their open-source colors

(Credit: Simon Phipps)

That said, the ironic thing is that while Phipps points to the benefits Brazil derives from its commitment to open-source Java, he neglects to note that Brazil had this same commitment to Java long before it was actually open source.

Regardless, in describing Lula's affection for open source Phipps unwittingly makes him sound like an open-source groupie, which is hardly how I'd want my president to act, either for proprietary or open-source interests.

A sovereign nation should be just that: sovereign. Its leaders shouldn't bow to particular vendors or even particular development practices, nor should they be perceived to do such. For Brazil, it's immaterial whether the company is Sun, Red Hat, Microsoft, or SAP: it is a sovereign nation and should act as such.

A government tasked with the protection of its people should never look like a cheap infomercial for any vendor--either open source or proprietary.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

While some organizations continue to hide their open-source adoption, NOiV (Nederland Open in Verbinding), has published a map of over 200 open-source products currently in use by the Dutch central government as of mid-2009. (Translation here.)

Spoiler alert: there's a whole lot of open source being used by the Dutch government.

NOiV concludes in its study (PDF) that that Dutch central government is on the right track with open source for the operating system (platform) and middleware, but is in a very early phase of looking at business applications.

Open-source Networking Software Used by Dutch government

(Credit: NOiV)

The main obstacle for moving from closed to open source even faster than it has is the high cost of migration, something that afflicts middleware and applications more than it does operating systems, as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recently noted.

Lest you think this move to open source is inspired by a cloud of cannabis smoke, the report also mentions significant improvements in interoperability (31 percent), cost reduction (8 percent), and quality improvements in the municipal governments (22 percent).

If that's what open source delivers, pass the bong!

The adoption map shows a wide range of open-source technologies being adopted, but the big winners at present are Linux, MySQL, Nagios, OpenOffice (and associated ODF plug-in), Firefox, Apache (Web server), SSH, and Tomcat.

With Forrester suggesting that 2009 IT budgets will fall 10.6 percent in 2009, it's a good time to be looking at high-value, low-cost open-source software. Just like those crazy Dutch.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

The U.K. government claims that it may save 75 million pounds ($119 million) over the next five years by harnessing itself firmly to Microsoft. That may be true, but the cost savings come from what the U.K. would have paid Microsoft, and they don't take into account what it could have saved by shopping around.

More ironic, however, than such ironic "cost savings" is its nomenclature: Angela Eagle, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, suggests the Microsoft purchase "reinforces the Government's commitment to its Open Source Action Plan." Huh??? Buying lots of non-open-source Microsoft software is a commitment to...open source?

I think Eagle needs a primer on what open source means, and what it costs.

Perhaps Gartner could help. Gartner is now saying that e-commerce teams within IT departments can shave 35 percent off their costs by using open source. Forrester, for its part, surveyed a wide range of corporations and found that 87 percent had achieved cost savings through open source.

Some public sector organizations get it. The United Nations, for example, is rolling out a new program to bring tuition-free higher education to the world using open source and open course materials. And the U.S. Department of Defense continues to increase its adoption of open source to boost productivity while simultaneously cutting costs.

Microsoft is, of course, getting more active in open source, and is also trying to learn to integrate open-source principles (like hassle-free evaluations), but having some seriously mixed results.

However, buying more Office licenses won't net the U.K. any open-source cost savings, from Microsoft or anyone else. It's very likely the U.K. could significantly improve upon its savings with Microsoft simply by using open source. I'd be willing to wager that the U.K. could save at least five times that amount...in the first year.

Will Eagle give me the chance to prove it? Not likely, mate.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Silicon Valley and the entrepreneurship it fosters is different because it thrives on adversity, on making much out of little. This is why Sarah Lacy is right to rebuke Thomas Friedman's suggestion that the U.S. government should bail out venture capital firms:

Friedman further says in the column that "Bailing out the losers is not how we got rich as a country, and it is not how we'll get out of this crisis." Agreed. But what country got rich by bailing out winners? Is that even a concept that makes sense? I can't imagine a greater a waste of shareholder money than giving it to people who don't need it and aren't asking for it....

The reason recession-born companies are so inventive and daring is because founders are forced to work within constraints, precisely because it is harder to raise capital. Nothing kills a great idea like too much cash. Unless it's a flood of too much taxpayer cash, because then we all lose.

Somehow, somewhere, someone decided that government was the answer to the economic crisis, conveniently overlooking government's complicity in encouraging the U.S. consumer to consume far beyond the boundaries of common sense. But I don't blame government for my problems. Nor do I ask it to bail me out.

I certainly don't expect the government to bail out venture capitalists, a group that has not asked for government money and would almost certainly chafe under its strictures. These are people that ostensibly get paid to take risks. The system fails if the VCs can simply get fat on government money.

In many ways, it's already failing due to too much institutional investor funding. Too much money is chasing too few deals is the increasingly conventional wisdom. We need venture firms to fail. We need money to settle into the most intelligent and hungry investors' hands, rather than being shoveled into the pockets of paltry hacks that know how to collect a management fee and little else.

The Gordon Gecko character in Wall Street proclaimed that "Greed is good," but the reality is that "Greed mitigated by failure" is better. We want ambition. We also want poorly executed ambition punished.

That's what makes Silicon Valley great. It's also what made the United States great. We get the air knocked out of us and we get back up. But that initial pain is critical to the recovery. The more the government and others try to soften the acute pain of loss, the less we will strive for gain.

I've found this to be true in my own life. When I told my father that I was planning to go to Brown for my undergraduate studies, he replied, "That's great. Who is going to pay for it?" I went instead to BYU, which gave me a scholarship.

Later, when my wife and I were living in England for my Masters program, I called my mother to get some financial back-up (which she had been giving all along to make it possible for me to study there). She told me 'No." That 'No' proved foundational in forcing me to pull myself up by my bootstraps, as it were, and become self-sufficient.

In like manner, we shouldn't bail out VCs. Let them fail. That's the best way to ensure they'll succeed.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

Even as open source thrives in the downturn, with many open-source vendors reporting significantly increased interest in open solutions as budgets get slashed, the U.S. federal government has decided to put U.S. taxpayer dollars into play to fund a study of just how much money can be saved by moving to open source.

Rather than a broad-based study, however, Congress approved a measure that will study the viability and financial effects of open-source health IT providers, as noted in the stimulus bill [PDF - see page 488] and reported on Slashdot:

STUDY AND REPORT ON AVAILABILITY OF OPEN SOURCE HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS. --

(A) IN GENERAL.--The Secretary of Health and Human Services shall...conduct a study on--

(i) the current availability of open source health information technology systems to Federal safety net providers (including small, rural providers);

(ii) the total cost of ownership of such systems in comparison to the cost of proprietary commercial products available;

(iii) the ability of such systems to respond to the needs of, and be applied to, various populations (including children and disabled individuals); and

(iv) the capacity of such systems to facilitate interoperability.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services is then to report back by October 1, 2010, with a report detailing its findings and conclusions.

Assuming the report is favorable, I suspect that part of that report will offer a hint as to the role open source could play beyond the healthcare industry. As reported by CNET earlier, President Obama has already asked Sun chairman Scott McNealy to draft a white paper that details the benefits of open source. Between this and the Health and Human Services report, it's very possible that the U.S. federal government will have established IT policies that favor open source.

I've long been a critic of government mandates for open source, in part because open-source adoption within the federal government has been strong in the absence of mandates, but a policy that requires consideration of open source as a way to lower costs and vendor lock-in strikes me as appropriate and a good use of taxpayer funds.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

Apparently, even technology companies want a bail-out.

Recently, the CEOs of Google, IBM, and other technology companies converged on the White House to lobby President Obama for key measures like broadband investments to be included in the U.S. government stimulus package. It's one thing to see U.S. auto makers, perpetually inefficient and ineffective in the market, begging for government hand-outs. It's quite another to see the leaders of the world's most successful technology companies seeking the dole, as well.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt made it clear what he hoped to gain from his government intervention in The Wall Street Journal:

Eric Schmidt of Google Inc. said in an interview that he appreciated the emphasis on renewable-energy technology and the deployment of broadband services. "All of that is a real positive for [Google]," he said. "The things that we asked for are in there."

I'm sure they are, and many of them are likely worthy government investments. But with the U.S. in a deep recession after decades of profligate consumer and business spending and subsequent debt, why are successful companies like IBM and Google lining up to help further indebt the government to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars?

We can do better than this. The technology industry has traditionally thrived in the absence of excessive government oversight or involvement. In Silicon Valley, where Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is considered a libertarian Bible of sorts, it feels wrong to see its industry leaders seeking a stimulus that will do more to help these particular companies than the larger technology industry, an industry that does just fine without government bail-outs.

The way out of the recession is to accept that our past mistakes will of necessity be painful, and let prices drop until they hit the point that debt-struck consumers can afford to spend again. It's not to prop up dying industries, or even healthy industries, with fiscal stimuli that mostly stimulate government, as Daniel Henninger points out in The Wall Street Journal, and government lobbyists, as a recent Foreign Policy article highlights, not businesses.

Business are stimulated by real customers buying real products in the midst of real competition. This is the very type of competition in which technology has thrived. Google doesn't need the U.S. government to buy into its broadband and renewable energy proposals to grow. It needs to continue to strike at Microsoft's jugular. IBM doesn't need to feed at the stimulus trough, either: it needs to continue to expand internationally and invest in making its bloated enterprise products lighter and easier to use.

We, the technology industry, don't need government bail-outs. We need to get lean and compete hard.

Given how poorly the government seems to do with spending money (feeble-minded stimulus bill, anyone?), it's refreshing to hear about TransparencyCamp, an effort to "remix the geeks and the wonks so we can integrate transparency with policy in the government."

It's a laudable goal--one to be welcomed as technology CEOs lobby the U.S. federal government for policies and "stimuli" favorable to themselves.

This "unconference" has already assembled some stellar participants, including Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, Apache luminary Brian Behlendorf, Bob Biersack of the Federal Election Commission, USA.gov team leader Sheila Campbell, several congressional staff members, and others.

It's an interesting initial foray into bridging the gap between technology policy and technology practitioners, but will only succeed if it moves beyond talk to action. Let's hope that the unconference doesn't content itself with transparency for transparency's sake, and instead agitates for real change in the way government does business.