On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 11:37 AM, James Kaplan <[email protected]> wrote:
> How about speaking to our colleges & universities? LCC, for example, is up
> to their eyeballs in microsoft.
> Productivity suffers, taxpayers (blindly) pay recurring license fees, and
> students suffer as microsoft's rapine
> continues to crash, cost, and academic programs are cut to insure buggy,
> megalithic, obnoxious, and irritating programs and systems are kept in
> place.
>
> Yesterday in the LCC Library, the whole system crashed, it took over 5
> minutes to sign me in to the Novell server, and I couldn't print materials
> for class that morning.
>
> Stability & cost controls should be priority, not contracts and management
> jobs.
This hearkens back to the discussion 2-3 weeks back about legal
changes that might be made to force migration from vendor lock-in
software. I'll pass on a suggestion made by others in that regard.
The underlying notion is that the cost of migrating from a particular
vendor's software should be given very great weight when deciding what
software units of government should procure. The method I've seen
advocated is to require that the cost of migration from the tendered
software be added to the bid price when evaluating competing bids.
There is some supportive existing law on the subject, although I won't
inflict that essay today.
But this approach does not of necessity lead to a decision to use open
source software. Many open source advocates give strong lip service to
"open standards" but have a serious blind spot when it comes to the
quality of standards.
For example, the OpenDocument Formats ("ODF") standard is absolute
rubbish that does not specify the conformity requirements that are
essential to achieve interoperability. There are precisely zero
different ODF implementations that can interoperate and they are
therefore all non-substitutable, so under the "price of lock-in"
approach to government procurement discussed above, government could
become every bit as locked into an ODF implementation as they could to
Microsoft Office. The government procurement folk are left with a
choice among evils.
On the other hand, if government units were required to add the price
of escaping from lock-in to bid prices, there would be strong
financial incentives for open saucers (and others) to develop and
implement standards that do specify the conformity requirements that
are essential to achieve interoperability, and hence substitutability
of their products. Where products can be substituted, the price of
escaping from lock-in is low to non-existent.
Microsoft has long understood the importance of interoperability. And
interoperability among its own products is really all the company has
to offer. Microsoft has an enormous stack of integrated software, from
the operating system to the intranet to the internet, with very deep
integration of its productivity apps. Open saucers thus far have had
very little to offer on the desktop integration front, only bits and
pieces. Nothing approaching a large integrated stack of desktop
software also integrated with a stack on the server side.
To be sure, Microsoft has helped that situation along by creating a
host of interoperability barriers for those who would interoperate
with its stack. Microsoft exposes some APIs, but generally surrounds
them with a thicket of patents and licensing terms incompatible with
FOSS.
But I think the "price of lock-in" approach would be a large step in
the right direction. It would likely nudge open saucers to pay far
more attention to the quality of the standards they implement.
Best regards,
Paul
--
Universal Interoperability Council
<http:www.universal-interop-council.org>
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