Posted on 09/29/2005 8:52:01 PM PDT by Golden Eagle
The broader media usually take little interest in public policy debates about technology, but they’re missing a big story in Massachusetts.
The technology trades, blogs and industry are buzzing about a monumental policy shift in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Officials in the state have proposed a new policy that mandates that every state technology system use only applications designed around OpenDocument file formats.
Such a policy might seem like something that should concern only a small group of technology professionals, but in fact the implications are staggering and far-reaching. The policy promises to burden taxpayers with new costs and to disrupt how state agencies interact with citizens, businesses and organizations.
Worse, the policy represents an attack on market-based competition, which in turn will hurt innovation. The state has a disaster in the making.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
That is just ridiculous. First of all, this situation has nothing to do with sales. Secondly, what good are sales for the customer when companies create software which can't talk with each other? Third, the government isn't going to tell me anything. As a software engineer, I can serve my own desires to modify others peoples GPL code which they created for their own personal desire. I don't have to release the code if I just keep it to myself or an organization doesn't have to release it if they only use it within the organization. Also if you notice, a lot of the best OS software is not GPL(IIRC, Apache, Python, Perl, PostgreSQL, and a lot of the bigger projects) so to call them communist is just ridiculous.
*BAM* Right on the money!
"open source business models"
http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=%22open+source+business+model%22&btnG=Search
97,200 hits
EE, started out working on Data General and Honywell systems for the Air Force designing custom interface and control boards and eventually even custom designed systems based on VME. Eventually moved into MIS out of interest and have sinced worked with most every major product including VMS, Unix, Apple, Next, Novell, Microsoft, and now some Linux. Now I work in senior management and provide oversight of a WAN, but still like to get my hands dirty as much as possible. Bottom line, I'm more than qualified to discuss any of these subjects, not only from the technical perspective, but from a historical or business standpoint, and these guys trying to insult me probably don't have half the background I bring to the discussion. In fact, I'm sure they'll attack me again now.
Supportive Documents:
The open-source model has a lot to offer the business world. It's a way to build open standards as actual software, rather than paper documents. It's a way that many companies and individuals can collaborate on a product that none of them could achieve alone. It's the rapid bug-fixes and the changes that the user asks for, done to the user's own schedule.
The open-source model also means increased security; because code is in the public view it will be exposed to extreme scrutiny, with problems being found and fixed instead of being kept secret until the wrong person discovers them. And last but not least, it's a way that the little guys can get together and have a good chance at beating a monopoly.
Of all these benefits, the most fundamental is increased reliability. And if that's too abstract for you, you should think about how closed sources made the Year 2000 problem worse and why they might have very well killed your business.
Gerald P. Weinberg once famously observed that, "If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization." He was right. Up to now, the reliability of most software has been atrociously bad.
The foundation of the business case for open-source is high reliability. Open-source software is peer-reviewed software; it is more reliable than closed, proprietary software. Mature open-source code is as bulletproof as software ever gets.
Until recently this was a radical idea to many businesspeople; many had a belief that open-source software is necessarily not "professional," that it is shoddily made and more prone to fail than closed software.
But the Internet's infrastructure makes the best possible refutation, and since OSI was founded in 1998 many people have been paying attention. Consider DNS, sendmail, the various open-source TCP/IP stacks and utility suites, and the open-source scripting languages such as Perl that are behind most "live" content on the Web. These are the running gears of the Internet. (Read this for a look at what would happen if they disappeared).
These open-source programs have demonstrated a level of reliability and robustness under fast-changing conditions (including a huge and rapid increase in the Internet's size) that, considered against the performance record of even the best closed commercial software, is nothing short of astonishing.
You can read an extended technical argument for the superior reliability of general open-source software in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". This paper was behind Netscape's pioneering decision to take its client software open-source. It describes a bazaar style of managing software development that depends on open source and leads to high reliability and quality.
The real-world evidence backs this up. In an independent head-to-head reliability test, open-source Unix systems and utilities were less fragile – crashed or hung less often – than their proprietary counterparts. The paper describing this test is available here.
The business implication of this technical case is clear. Eventually, bazaar-mode peer review will come to be considered a necessary condition for highest quality. In many market niches, software that has not been peer-reviewed simply won't be perceived as good enough to compete.
Bazaar-mode development seems to reverse our normal expectations about software development; more programmers are better (at least, as long as the capacity of the project leader or project core group to handle integration isn't exceeded). Even a small open-source project can muster more brains to improve a piece of software than most development shops can possibly afford.
You'll see the following gains under the open-source model whether you're producing software for internal use or for resale.
It follows that commercial developers leveraging the bazaar mode should be able to grab, and keep, a substantial initiative advantage over those that don't. But there's more; the first commercial developer in a given market niche to switch to this mode may gain substantial advantages over later ones.
Why? Because the pool of talent available for bazaar recruitment is limited. The first bazaar project in a given niche is more likely to attract the best co-developers to invest time in it. Once they've invested the time, they're more likely to stick with it.
Switching to the open-source model should also be good for a significant overhead reduction in per-project software production costs.
The open-source model allows software shops to (in effect) outsource some of their work, paying for it in values less tangible than money. (But perhaps not less economically significant; the increased speed with which an outside co-developer can have a needed bug fix will often translate into a substantial opportunity gain for that customer.)
This means smaller shops will be able to handle bigger projects.
If you produce software for sale, you'll see two more advantages:
One of the most often-repeated pieces of management advice is "Stay close to the customer." In today's fast-moving, short-product-cycle business climate it's more important than ever to do that – to understand almost as soon as they do what the customers want and be able to rapidly respond to those needs.
If you sell software, what better way to do this than by co-opting your customers' engineers to help your development?
It's worth pointing out that the open-source, bazaar method resembles the way many successful Japanese companies have done consumer product development; get a product to market that works but is not perfect, and iterate quickly based upon customer feedback to reach the combination of features that the customers need and want. This has turned out to be especially valuable for high technology products (laptops, personal assistants, cellphones, etc) that people don't know they need, or what features they need.
An important side-effect of the open-source model will be a much wider platform range for your product. Open-source authors frequently find themselves receving, for free, port changes for operating systems and environments they barely know exist and can't afford developers to support. Each such port, of course, widens the market appeal of the product.
For an entrepreneur or start-up software producer, going open-source is a way to grab mind-share. The best new concept in the world won't make money unless people know it's interesting.
Whether this makes sense as a strategy depends on whether you think your main value proposition is in the software itself or in service and the expertise associated with the software. More often than one might think, the value is actually in service and integration.
This, to give one recent example, the startup Digital Creations open-sourced its flagship project Zope on the advice of its venture capitalists. The VCs projected that going open-source would actually increase the value of the company.
For full discussion see Paul Everitt's business decision essay. It makes an eloquent case.
You can also read Wired magazine's tour of open-source startups..
Now for a higher-level, investor's point of view. There are at least four known business models for making money with open source:
The open-source culture's exemplars of commercial success have, so far, been service sellers or loss leaders. Nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that the clearest near-term gains in open-source will be in widget frosting.
For widget-makers (such as semiconductor or peripheral-card manufacturers), interface software is not even potentially a revenue source. Therefore the downside of moving to open source is minimal.
(Frank Hecker of Netscape proposes more models and discusses them in detail in his paper Setting Up Shop.)
There are even, as it turns out, people willing to argue that the open-source model could work well economically for hardware design.
It's kind of like the time I was called a 'nazi' on a looting thread (I advocating shooting violent looters)...and then the same person pleaded for 'civility' afterwords.
90% of their constituents already have access to it. Those that don't, know someone who has it, or can easily access it at a library or rent time at countless locations without even being required to own a computer.
Open office? 1.0.2 installed nicely, runs fine, but doesn't have a save as PDF that I've ever found. The installer for 1.9 was a piece of junk. It wouldn't install where I wanted it, didn't configure the software right, and made OO a pain to use. (I don't recall it doing PDFs either) I dumped it off my computer (it wouldn't uninstall cleanly, either). I'll give the current version a try. Will 1.1.5 do it, or do I need 2.0?
I didn't say either was better, I gave you multiple solutions to this supposed problem, that already exist and make this supposedly required change moot.
Thanks for the reply. You didn't mention any programming experience. Have you done any? Why have you started using Linux?
Totally agree. A third party will probably come in and add this functionality through a module. I've already heard the hard ass at MA is set to retire here soon anyway, just like a lib, mess it all up then bail.
The geeks are excited about the idea of Linux on every desktop; whee - not going to happen in any state.
Roger that again. Simply too hard for the average Joe, who can't even keep their Windows boxes working all the time or get their plug and play devices or software to work right either. They're not going to care too much for open office if they've been using the real thing much either.
Can you offer a solution that doesn't require paying MS? As was pointed out, their free readers require you to pay for their operating system software to run them. Why should taxpayers have to pay MS to see the information their state has collected?
I just looked again. It isn't there in my version of OpenOffice. (1.0.2) What version do I need? (As I mentioned in another reply, I had a bad experience with 1.9 and dumped it once, going back to the older version).
I did lots of assembly programming back when I was building control systems and interface design. Probably why I got out of it, LOL. Now I do a lot of HTML, almost every day, and limited .net and java although I often just make minor updates to what the guys on my team have come up with on their own. I have a Linux box at my house I'm poking around with, although I prefer Sun Solaris and Apple OSX which I think are more mature and stable. It's too bad all this investment has gone into a foreign clone instead of our existing Unix products. Linux is about where Next was 10 years ago.
Sure. Load Apple or Sun Solaris, then some freeware software app that allows you to view the MS formats. Not as easy as using MS Office, but you're hardly locked out even with a different O/S.
Those experiences aren't typical, in my experience basically everything is more difficult in Linux, and generally unbiased users report the same. Something will have to be unquestionably better to unseat MS, like Windows was when it arrived. Wordstar and 123 had their own printer drivers, unique command structure, no wysiwyg or easy cut paste. I used Apple and Next a lot back then too, but Apple and Next weren't readily available, and cost significantly more.
So what the purpose of having taxpayers pay for MS's Office suite? Since Office 12 is changing the file format, and this new MS file format has a userbase of zero, is new and untested, etc., why not use this situation to ask vendors to adhere to a common, open standard for saving information? What is the advantage to MA and MA taxpayers that you perceive in maintaining vendor lock-in with MS and their proprietary file formats and expensive upgrade cycle?
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