Bill Gates works for the NBR!

Published: October 26, 2005

by frog

One of the many things that the Greens talk about which no one else around Parliament seems to notice is the issue of Open Source software. Nandor put out a number of releases (links below) on the subject and Metiria picked up the baton last week when she took over from him as IT Spokesperson.

Then on Monday Francis Till took aim at the entire sequence of releases in an online NBR piece called Open source in government: A delusional cheer from the Greens. (Also available here). Needless to say, the Greens don’t agree and I’m happy to pick the argument apart, so here we go.

Till writes:

When Laurence Millar, Deputy Commissioner for information and communication technologies at the State Services Commission, last week celebrated the negotiation of an all-of-government license agreement between the Department of Inland Revenue and Novell, hardly an eyebrow was raised — except in the Green camp, which exploded in a fit of irrational exuberance.

Mr Millar’s enthusiastic take on the license — which extends discounts on Novell products, including its brand of Linux, Suse to approximately 50 government agencies, and includes support and price protection — would have made Nandor Tanczos happy.

In May, when the government released its rather woeful ‘digital strategy,’ Nandor had lamented the absence of any reference to open source products.

“Firstly, the potential role of Open Source software is not mentioned at all, which, given the increasing size of that sector, the potential for New Zealand businesses to get into the action and the fact that DHBs are investigating a move to Open Source operating systems, is both surprising and disappointing,” he said then.

Apart from the fact that ‘open source’ is treated as a proper noun by only acronym makers (OSS is ‘open source software’) and the Linux zealot faction of the IT universe, those for whom Microsoft is the software equivalent of the Great Satan, most of Nandor’s take on “the sector” was wrong.

When the Digital Strategy discussion document came out, Green IT folx noticed that Open Source / OSS wasn’t mentioned at all. And even though the Greens and numerous other submitters pointed this out to the policy wonks, it still didn’t make it into the final paper.

The point isn’t that OSS is a miracle cure, but that the proprietary-non-proprietary debate is a global one and is getting more significant, particularly with the stuff going on in the EU with patent laws. Therefore, how come this debate isn’t mentioned in a discussion document and strategy document?

For the record, the Greens didn’t think that the Digital Strategy should have been saying “yay let’s be like Brazil and go Open Source“, but rather, ‘how come this isn’t being discussed?’

Till:

[Nandor's] errors were compounded by his replacement at the IT spokesperson helm, Metiria Turei, who crowed that the deal had “cleared the path for government agencies to adopt and expand their use of non-proprietary software” — failing to note that Novell is a company offering proprietary versions of OSS.

Novell is not selling a ‘proprietary version of OSS’, which is a contradiction in terms. Their Linux system – Suse – is still ‘free’ in the sense of ‘free speech’ rather than ‘free beer’, i.e. while Novell charge money for Suse and the entire service package that comes with it, they do not restrict further ‘free’ redistribution of the code and program.

Till goes on:

[Metiria] went on in a lamentably predictable — and utterly wrong-headed — way to say:

“Clearly much will be made of the money that can be saved by moving away from inflexible licensing requirements, but, IMHO, the most important part of this deal is the opportunity for agencies to embrace the increased reliability, security and flexibility of Open Source,” Mrs Turei says.

“In turn, the economy of scale and credibility provided by the Government choosing Open Source should go some way to increasing its use in New Zealand generally, which in turn will start to roll back the virus-vulnerable Microsoft monoculture on Kiwi desktops.

“Also, Government has a democratic duty to provide information to the public that is in an accessible and open format. With Open Source software, no multinational company can limit what can be accessed and what is done with information.”

Ms Turei’s statement betrays an even more naïve understanding of the issues at stake than did even Nandor’s openly political rhetoric.

While it is certainly true that the open source movement has gained much ground in the last five years, revolutionising some practices, the tools it has produced tend to fill specialised, if not niche, needs — and not even those with universal success. [See, for example, the excellent paper, Open source: Open for business, from open source advocates, the Leading Edge Forum last year.]

What it comes down to for advocates, often, is not that open source products are better than those from, say, Microsoft, but that they are, well, not Microsoft products. For the Greens, as for many in the open source community, that’s enough.

The Greens’ line on Open Source has always been that it is about choice. Sure, many people are sceptical about Microsoft (and they have a right to think that if they want), but the main issue for the Greens has always been that people should have the right to make an informed choice as to what solutions are best for their own needs. If the decision is made that Microsoft is best, fine, but that decision needs to be made by people here, not lawyers in Redmond.

Till:

It can’t be, for the rest of us.

A few little judder bars on the road to enthusiasm

In looking over the Green statements about open source, a few problems stand out above the rest.

1. Health boards are not “investigating” the deployment of OSS. Only the Whanganui DHB is involved in anything like an investigation into OSS, according to the Dominion Post — and that’s only a small trial.

Wanganui is trialling and Green sources have told me Capital Coast are very intererested in the idea and are keeping an eye on the trial and other DHBs have asked to be briefed. But public comments from DHB IT managers at the time indicated that they were keen on an uptake of OSS tools like Open Office for non-critical users. They were going to let the Wanganui trial go ahead first.

The issue for the DHBs was not the quality and security of the software, but the willingness of their people to use something that looks a bit different, which is, in effect, a training or even cultural issue.

When Nandor raved about the Wanganui trial, he wasn’t claiming that this was some major deployment, but a small step and he congratulated them on taking Open Source into account when making appropriate cost evaluation decisions, not just because they were turning their back on Microsoft. He did the same when Victoria University opted for Red Hat last year.

Till:

2. While the open source software stack contains a large number of major applications, most discussion about open source centres on the operating system, Linux. The Linux component of the operating system sector is, indeed, growing — but only in a limited way and in back-end operations where the code being used is often highly modified and resembles out-of-box solutions in much the way reformed alcoholics and French Legionnaires resemble their baby photos.

Even in servers, its strongest point of contention, Linux holds only a very minor share of the market.

Like Weta Digital’s Linux server bank, which is the largest in the southern hemisphere, a tourist destination for computer geeks and about to make a movie of Microsoft’s Halo game!

Till:

More, much of the non-server Linux uptake in the enterprise market during the last several years has been experimental in nature, with little sign of escalation — often for good reasons that include both security and cost of ownership.

Till overlooks that Linux has long had ICO-level certification for security.

Till:

3. Desktops are not moving to open source at all. According to IDC research published this June, businesses and manufacturers said only 1.1 per cent of whiteboxes bought and made would use Linux as an OS in 2005, and only 1.7 per cent of consumers were opting for Linux on notebooks.

Where Linux comes pre-installed, as with an increasing number of shipments to Asia, most analysts suspect that the OS is installed to reduce costs — and promptly replaced with pirated copies of Windows on purchase (or even pre-purchase).

Linux is, however, making great headway in places like China, but much of it is down to swapping Linux for Unix — and, quite possibly, that may reflect the ability of the government there to tinker with the inner code of any Linux release it approves.

Linux is also making great headway in places like South America, Germany, Austria, France, Ireland, Australia, just to name a few.

Till:

4. Regardless of a computer’s operating system, open source advocates are usually also hot on Open Office, a desktop productivity suite that has as its claim on audiences the fact that it is free, works almost as well as Microsoft Office 97 and is nearly interoperable with some of the Microsoft Office products that have been so far released.

But for enterprises, interoperability with off-campus software is key, as is internal integration across all software modules — and without an Outlook-like component, Open Office compels users to go to yet another party for email, contacts and calendaring functions.

Simply put, what good is a perfect spreadsheet or presentation worked up on an OSS product if it cannot be exported meaningfully to a client?

It can be. A whole lot of Greens out in the field use Open Office and the Green Parliamentary Office, which is obliged to use Windows by the Parliamentary Service, has no problems translating their documents when they’re sent in. Has Till ever used Open Office?

Till:

With over 300 million installations, Office has about a 95 per cent share of the desktop productivity suite installed base.

Based primarily on download information (40 million free Open Office downloads against over 300 million Office purchases), some analysts have suggested that Open Office commands between 10-15 per cent of the productivity suite footprint. [snip]

I’ve cut out there because Till goes on at some length about Open Office’s market share, which is not great, though he would see that as a victory for the superior Microsoft product, whereas I would see a commercial monopoly and software monoculture that is bad for the market, democracy and technological progress.

At least one independent tests has shown, over time, that Open Office — in all its iterations — is far less efficient to run than Microsoft products, something that will have escaped few resource conscious IT administrators.

Well, checking that link Till provides, I suppose I should assume that the guy with the blog knows what he’s talking about, though Till’s enthusiasm is beginning to make me wonder if Bill Gates has bought the NBR. :)

Till:

5. The idea that there is a large, untapped pool of Kiwi independent software vendors capable of providing tools and support for mission-critical installations of OSS products is patently false.

The Greens have never claimed there is a “a large, untapped pool of Kiwi independent software vendors “. What we are saying is that those people that are out there that are providing the tools are unable to do so becuase the biggest buyer of IT services is the Government and its not buying NZ product, open source or not. The Greens just think the New Zealand Government should at least try to ‘Buy Kiwi Made’ by accepting a moderate price tolerance for local product.

Till completely contradicts himself with the next sentence.

While there is little reliable data in New Zealand about what actually is available, in Australia — where the government is committed to examining OSS alternatives as part of software procurement — Senator Eric Abetz, the Special Minister of State in charge of such things, said this in April about an economy with more than ten times our local resources:

The irony here is that Till is quoting the Australian example of one of the things the Greens are calling for in New Zealand- a Government-published guide to help its agencies assess Open Source.

Till:

Australia’s OSS industry is still in a formative phase. [snip]

Like NZ’s, which is why it needs nurturing by the Government. Till then details that statement.

Till:

6. The closed nature of the Microsoft Office ecosystem is exaggerated.

Microsoft Office 12 — the coming version — will use an “open” XML code system, catchingly called the Microsoft Office Open XML Format, as a key component of its code engine.

The problem for the Open Office community is that they have standardised on another open source format, the OpenDocument format.

The upshot is that documents built on one system are unlikely to render properly, if at all, on the other. In fact, the new, OpenDocument-based OpenOffice 2 is not even backwards compatible with its own precursor.

Well, I have to say that the Greens are glad that Microsoft is moving towards standardised documents, it is about time. But why have they done this? Would they be doing it if the Open Source issue wasn’t around?

7. The “inflexible licensing requirements” Ms Turei described have nothing to do with Microsoft — which, if anything, has been faulted for the enormous number of options it offers.

Microsoft licensing has always been a sore point for the company, but claims that it is “inflexible” are last century bombast and getting farther from the fact every day.

In addition to special license structures for government and education use, Microsoft routinely negotiates even more flexibility into contracts with large users. The NZ government and educational system, in fact, are both beneficiaries of such negotiated agreements — and under one agreement, state and state-integrated schools can obtain an astonishing array of software (including Office 2003, Encarta and XP Pro) for under $50. Positively draconian.

Sure, the end-user licenses are becoming more flexible, but this is because of the criticism Microsoft faced. But they’re still very rigid, for instance try installing Firefox in a corporate environment, such as Parliament.

The question that has to asked, should children be educated in an environment dominated by corporations, let alone a corporate monopoly? There are obvious commercial benefits for Microsoft in having all school students being raised in their online environment.

8. The notion that open source products offer increased “reliability, security and flexibility” is increasingly difficult to credit.

See above re ICO certification.

On the security front alone, study after study has shown that open source code is more vulnerable to exploits than proprietary code — and the Linux community has been lucky, so far, that malware writers have tended to focus on other targets.

Well, malware writers target Microsoft because they don’t like them. Go figure.

Francis, the Greens recommend that you get yourself a subscription to 2600

[snip] 9. The idea that government “has a democratic duty to provide information to the public that is in an accessible and open format” is a fine declaration of principle, but meaningless in practice. If all the fancy word processing systems in the world were suddenly shut down, text documents could still be read — and if users based decisions on whether to use OpenOffice or Office on which was likely to be supported in ten or twenty years, Office would have to be the winner on the day.

Of course text documents can still be read, that’s cause they’re accessible and open formats!

Getting back on track

Despite Mr Millar’s ebullient waxings from the bully pulpit of the State Services Commission and ill-informed cheerleading from the Greens, not even the IRD is close to tossing Microsoft over for Novell and open source.

As the Dominion Post reported, the trial will allow the department to evaluate aspects of Novell’s software, measuring capability and price.

As it stands now, the government is a rabbit warren of department level bespoke IT solutions with isolated IT units sworn to their own unique visions.

Rather than encouraging further factionalism, the SSC should be taking a look at what Fonterra has done with its massive IT infrastructure.

Now in the final stages of unifying its far-flung IT empire under common standards, hardware and systems through a contract with EDS.

Fonterra’s EDS solution — or one like it — would not only produce actual savings for the government in the hundreds of millions of dollars once the churn subsided, but open new doors for innovation and the more effective, not to mention efficient, delivery of services through consolidation.

And that would be a real benefit to the ordinary New Zealander.

Francis Till needs to realise that the Green stance on IT issues is one based on freedom and choice.

The only reason Microsoft has stopped being so overtly closed and questionable over the last half decade is because of people questioning their proprietary, monopolistic approach to business. They have been severely punished for this both within the courts and in the public eye and they have changed their tune as a result. But they didn’t do it out of choice, why would they?

This debate is always a polarised one, there’s Linux geeks as much as there’s Microserfs, of whom Francis Till appears to be one.

The Greens don’t claim that Open Source is the solution for everything, but believe that as a nation, New Zealand needs to be careful about ensuring our business and our citizens are able to make informed choices.

frog says

Published in Economy, Work, & Welfare | Society & Culture by frog on Wed, October 26th, 2005   

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