The Open Source Dilemma for Governments 163
Sam Hiser writes "Tom Adelstein, open source consultant and Member of the Open Government Interoperability Project ("OGIP") working group, offers another incisive article in which he discusses the costs in the terms of lives and dollars when local governments do not deploy open standards-based software for data sharing. Asks Adelstein, 'Can local governments afford to create redundant applications to meet new Federal standards for first responder alerts, emergency services, law enforcement, broadcasters?' He posits that Open Source collaborative initiatives may provide the only solution for the US if the people want to create a safer environment."
Open Data formats more important (Score:5, Insightful)
The reverse would seem to be true (Score:5, Insightful)
it's already been admitted (Score:5, Insightful)
A goverment just has to say it's thinking about it to get Microsoft scared and giving out vouchers left right and centre.
Expect to see alot more
Re:Open Data formats more important (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The reverse would seem to be true (Score:1, Insightful)
What would that be other than a laptop and a GPS?
Maybe a webcam to do automatic license plate lookups?
SLG does not respond well to Open Source because (Score:5, Insightful)
2) it's too complex for SLG admins, it's not as easy to pass an open source torch on to your new team mate or underling.
what will motivate Open Sopurce Adoption?
those 400k novell seats and their admins that still run win9x and office 97 need an upgrade very badly. If Novell/SUSe and Ximian can pull off a compelling solution then you will see huga adoptions -- not these onsie twosie deals.
Mod me down if you like but this is a strong emerging market.
AMBER ALERT! (Score:4, Insightful)
When timing is critical a commercial solution can fall flat on it's face.
Re:Well i would have thought this is obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Potential resources mean nothing. Open source code that no-one bothers to read isn't going to get better on it's own.
Re:The reverse would seem to be true (Score:4, Insightful)
Why wouldn't a small commercial company writing open source software be in this exact same 'best possible' position? Nothing about open source precludes it from being commercial, especially when we are talking about niche hardware. Making it open source would just allow citizens to know what is going on, and allow another commercial company to take over when the first one goes out of business.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Open Source Software Institute... (Score:5, Insightful)
Care to tell me why that Apache is so much more secure then IIS?
Apache is the most popular web server in the world. But IIS has the most flaws....
Re:it's already been admitted (Score:3, Insightful)
If Microsoft thinks it's a bluff, they will call the bluff. The reason that they hand out discounts instead is because they know that it's not. OpenOffice/StarOffice might be an even bigger threat to their revenue stream than Linux is; it's already good enough for most office workers and is vastly cheaper. If a few people in the organization still need a function that they can only buy from Microsoft, no matter: the organization just buys a very small number of MS Office licenses.
Re:AMBER ALERT! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: The Open Source Software Institute... (Score:3, Insightful)
> > So as more people use open source, the bigger target it becomes to hackers.
> Care to tell me why that Apache is so much more secure then IIS? Apache is the most popular web server in the world. But IIS has the most flaws....
Because Apache was written to serve Web pages and IIS was written to make somebody rich(er).
Re:Tactical considerations (Score:3, Insightful)
Conversely, would you want all your image recognition algorithms (for TV guided missiles), your IR decoy rejection routines, your frequency hopping timings to be known to all and sundry, including the adversary?
"Look, {insert your favorite rebel army leader here]...here's the code for how the missile rejects the decoy flares. Now we can work around that." "ooohhh, and here's the Predator communications frequencies. We can start on spoofing those."
Re:Tactical considerations (Score:5, Insightful)
There are much worse ways that software can fail. One of the worst is software that looks like it's working, but in fact is not displaying new / updated items -- this leaves the warfighter with the false impression of situational awareness. Another popular failure is software that has time-consuming processing steps that don't have adequate progress indicators -- this leaves the warfighter wondering 'Is it done yet?' when it hangs or fails.
At least with a blue screen or core dump, you know you've got a problem, and you can restart / reboot to resume, with a well known startup time.
Re: The reverse would seem to be true (Score:5, Insightful)
> For pure niche apps (patrol car suspect lookups, etc), I would posit that small commercial companies are in the best possible position to provide support and apps, not the FOSS world
I have a friend who works in IT at a small college, and her group's primary responsibility is maintaining a big commercial app that manages schoolish stuff like registration, etc. Schools all over the state use the same app, so they have a sort of loose association of maintainers across the state, several per college, adding up to several score programmers in total.
She gripes a lot because every time a new release comes out the association has to hack back in all the customizations they've made over the years. I keep telling her that for the number of people and amount of effort involved, they could write their own FOSS application to do the same thing, and spend their time making improvements rather than restoring last year's hacks year after year.
> after all, where does your teenage A-Patchy Webserver hacker get his hands on the specialty hardware used in patrol cars?
Who says it has to be teenage hackers? If a dozen of the biggest cities' IT departments dedicated one programmer each, the job could be done easily at a dispersed cost, trivial in comparison to the total spent when thousands of cities buy the software at commercial prices.
The squeaky wheel gets the oil (Score:2, Insightful)
In many cases, the way that government works is that the budget-busters will wnd up getting more funding (despite being called to make cuts and everything). This is especially true if you're facing "essential" government expenditures such as the military (notorious for paying $100 for toilet seats and such). It would simply be too difficult for any politician to justify slashing funds to a military at its budgetary "capacity", especially these days, and this is why the Army is giving Microsoft huge [slashdot.org] and (in my opinion) bloated contracts, so that when they need fighter jets or nukes they can say, "See we're operating at capacity, and you can't seriously *not* give us funding, right?"
It's the first trick in the bureaucratic hnadbook: spending money makes you look busy so that you can get more money and look even busier. Government agencies are like parasites that just consume as much as they can and continue to consume more (not that we don't need these agencies, per se).
This is why a giant surplus was effectively erased by Bush as a result of a substantial wealthy-heavy tax cut and exorbitant funding on this corporate-sponsored war effort.
Call it my paranoia. But in a word, open source would be great for our (and any government), but open source isn't precisely what governments want. I think they are looking more for the happy median where they can still break the bank a bit, without becoming too bloated. It's like walking the fine line between losing funding for not spending enough (and having unused cash in your account) and getting cut for spending too much (and looking bad and calling into question how "necessary" certain things are).
Which is why it is ideal (and why we see very often "looking into" open source but contracting a discounted Microsoft deal.
True enough but (Score:5, Insightful)
The same government that you are railing about is the reason nobody's dying in low speed head-on crashes from getting a steering column rammed through their chest.
The car companies were quoting "market forces" and "nobody will want to pay for collapsible steering columns," and people were pinned to their seats like butterflies to cardboard. Sound familiar? Its the justification of every elite to anything that's going to cut into sl/easy profit.
Management of government by objectives without citizen input into what the objectives are is disastrous.
Remember Clinton's medical plan fiasco that was thrown out, not by elected representatives like the congress, but by HMO lobby groups posing as experts, as being unmanagable.
You didn't get to register so much as a peep for or against or make a suggestion. It was managed right out of your hands.
People are dying because their only sin is being temporarily broke from the last scrape with the health care system.
Re:gov't lacking in expertise and money for softwa (Score:3, Insightful)
The article is also about paying for the software ONE time and using it everywhere, instead of paying for EACH copy of it everywhere it is or might be used.
That does not necessarily require Open Source, but Open Source is much more likely to make this possible than current proprietary commercial solutions.
Instead of paying a license to use each copy of the software, you pay someone to write the software, and you pay someone (not necessarily the same person!) to support the software.
Eventually, we'll probably end up with a federally funded department that writes and/or supports these applications. Local governments can use them for free and get support as needed (maybe with a small fee?). If a local government wants something that does not already exist they can pay to have it created (so that department isn't flooded with unnecessary requests), then others can obtain it for free. It would be a lot cheaper than everyone paying for licenses to use commercial software, and would directly affect our taxes.
Re:Well i would have thought this is obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder why all this commercial propaganda on slashdot recently?
There are 6,000,000,000 people in the world. It is a statistical certainty that a significant fraction of these will have both the means and the motivation to work on any commonly used piece of software, if it is accessible. ie. open source. Please remove your paid commercial blinkers.
---
User friendly M$Windows/XP.
User unfriendly M$Windows/XP license.
Re:it's already been admitted (Score:3, Insightful)
The profit on selling Microsoft Office must be much greater than the profit on selling a bundled OEM preinstll of Windows.
Furthermore, OpenOffice.org represents one less reason to be locked in to Windows. The more cross-over applications you run, the sooner you will realize one of these years that "Hey, we could just switch over to <Insert popular Open Source OS of the day>.
For both of the foregoing reasons, I agree that OpenOffice.org is a much bigger threat (short term) to Microsoft than Linux is. Linux is a longer term threat. But tools like OpenOffice.org are what helps to make it so.
Re:Well i would have thought this is obvious (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Open Source Software Institute... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, THIS is one of the leading causes I've found of govt. computer problems. They start with a flawed data model, and man, I've seen some doozys!!! But, it gets cobbled together to 'work'. Then, it becomes the standard..and more things are hooked to it...also kludged to work..and systems kludged to work with those systems...ad nauseum.
I know its tough, but, if you can get the data model created correctly to replace the old one...would be the best way to go if caught early, to prevent the potentially coming mess of spaghetti code...
Of course, if you can talk them into creating a new system from scratch...with a proper data model, and open standards..better for the govt., and a long term bit of work for you!!!
So few people understand this...if you get the data model right...most everything else will fall into place, but, I see so often, this cornerstone to good computing put together by someone who just never seems to have had any training in relational theory...at least since RDBMSes still predominate the scene for now...
Re: The reverse would seem to be true (Score:2, Insightful)
This is assuming that their changes are accepted into the root source tree (which is a false assumption). If the changes/features are too specialized/customized (they apply to only that particular college) and if they interfere with other features, they most likely will not be accepted and they will be in exactly the same boat as they are in now.
Just because a particular software package is "OpenSource" does not imply that any and all features will be put into the root source tree.
Re:The Open Source Software Institute... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a strong statement. I'd say that there is more FUD in your post than in the original article. Maybe you forget that a lot of Slashdotters are, or have been government workers too...
'"Code Security" is not a big problem in local government -- as local governments generally only use their digital systems to warehouse and process publically available information. These guys keep paper records going back to the 18th century, and if anything seems out of the ordinary they check the paper.'
I worked at a federal agency that had everything stored on paper too. One day they decided to double check some things and found out the off-site storage facility they had been paying for years had no idea where most of their documents were. Those that could be found were water damaged beyond being readable.
So much for using paper as a back-up mechanism. I think part of the point of the article is that local governments do things on-the-cheap and that if they all shared more of their systems the systems would likely improve for everyone, even the smallest local agencies.
"And if asked, we readily turn over our code to local auditors. Very rarely do we do this. Nobody cares about anything except getting the software to cut down on their workload."
Sam here. But they never ask. Thats the problem. They don't know if contractors are sticking to standard coding practices, they don't know if third party "shareware" components have snuck into their systems (and they have) and they don't get involved with these issues until something breaks, and by then it's probably too late. More eyes on the code solves this too. Worst case, after the same breakage occurs for one local shop, other local shops will at least be aware that there is a problem that needs to be addressed (and most of them will only have to apply the fix, not invent it).
"And that's the biggest problem in this market: accountability. Small companys come in, install software, and then disappear."
Right, small companies like yours, supplying one of a kind mixtures of COTS software and local code. You most likely have a long term contract where you are because you have wired a dependence on your institutional knowledge into your systems. Good for you, not good for taxpayers.
"Can you imagine the accountability headaches associated with asking a "community" to write custom tax logic? "
Again, you seem to have missed the point, which was that there is not all that much variation from one location to another. The types of variation caused by different tax rates etc. should not be buried in code logic anyway, but should be in parameter control files and be alterable at a fairly high level.
"Don't get me wrong...I like the idea of getting more eyes on my code...but I can't imagine injecting community code into a hectic development schedule like we maintain."
Well, from what you have said, it most likely wouldn't be your code getting examined. Most likely in fact you would adapt code written at a larger, richer locality to your needs.
"My boss would surely never go for it. Of course, I don't expect many of the OSS acolytes to agree with me...some people don't seem to understand that the minimum wage people working without possibility of overtime at the county clerk's office don't want to visit the newsgroups for help when they have bugs preventing their license software from printing."
Both you, and your boss probably won't go for it until you see other similar localities going for it successfully. At the federal level almost everyone looks to other agencies for guidance. With no agency in a clear leadership position you end up with the same thing you get in any leaderless organizations, n
Re: The reverse would seem to be true (Score:3, Insightful)
I would lay good odds that once upon a time I worked for the company that made the software your friend maintains. (There aren't that many companies who do this sort of software, and I worked for one who now has more than 500 colleges as customers.) With that in mind, I think I can offer some explanation for your friend's complaints, and why open source wouldn't work to solve her problem. Let's start with a good rule of thumb:
With that in mind, let's examine the software for administering a typical 4-year college. While much of the software would be recognizable as accounting software: inventory, accounts receiveable, account payable, general ledger, payroll, etc, it will have been customized specifically for the quirks of running a large institution with a continually changing student body. Then add on class scheduling and grade calculation modules, as well as security levels to protect the privacy and security of confidential data, such as financial and health records. Finally, throw in yearly updates for the financial aid software, which has to change to meet new requirements from the US Department of Education every year. At this point you're probably talking about 5-10 million SLOCs, with a user base of 500 customers, or an OSFF of 0.0001 or less.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there are accounting certifications that have to be renewed on a yearly basis, or the college could fail an audit, which could result in its accredidation being suspended. All in all, maintaining this type of software is a very time-consuming and expensive proposition, and we're still only talking about the base package, before customizations.
Customizations can take many forms. Typical customizations are parameter-driven (school name, address, etc.) but many are the result of specific local policies and requirements. You're really talking about separate source code forks for each school. Add up the collective customizations from 500 schools are you might be talking about as much source code as the base software.
That much complexity is hard to manage; its not surprising that the company in question doesn't maintain the customizations for an individual school...
Almost any vertical application for a sufficiently complex business will have the same sort of problem, which is the major reason why Open Source Software will have a great deal of difficulty in displacing proprietary vertical applications. There just aren't enough customers for that type of software to develop the sort of community necessary to support the many man-years necessary to code an OSS competitor.
Re:Open Data formats more important (Score:3, Insightful)
'Terroist' seems to have replaced 'Commie', 'Russian' &c in the language of US politics. Compare the speeches of President Bush Jr with those of Vice-President Bush Sr in the 1980s. SSDD (Same shit, different decade).
Stephen