Open-source penalty for Microsoft?
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No, I don't mean the soap opera antics of It doesn't matter. The damage that counts is already done. Microsoft has been judged to be an As for the punishment, if the U.S. and/or state government really want tostick it to Microsoft, they need do nothing to Microsoft. Theymerely need to adjust their own practices. The worst damage governmentscan do to Microsoft is to give open source consideration for use inpublic software projects. It's plain common sense that if our taxes are going toward one of the manycomputer projects that aren't secreted under the national defenseumbrella, we should have access to the source code of that project. Thisarrangement offers a number of distinct benefits. First, open source code offers taxpayers the opportunity to see if theyare getting their tax dollar's worth, since shoddy workmanship can beexposed by watchdog groups. Vendors afraid of having their work publiclyaccessible would shy away from government projects, lesseningopportunities for patronage and graft. On the flip side, companies whosework does shine when exposed to the light would be able to enhancetheir reputations. There would be less opportunity for smoke and mirrorsin publicly funded IT. Next, making government software projects open sourced would provide the same benefits as making any project open sourced. When the code is open, there's less wheel-reinvention because each project can build upon the work of previous projects. In government at any level, how much time and money is wasted by different departments re-commissioning the same database application with some local modifications? Imagine how much duplication, how many tax dollars, could be saved by encouraging code sharing and reuse. Also, open sourcing public projects allows for a previouslyunavailable path to citizen participation in government. By making source code available, bugs in the system have substantially more likelihood of being discovered and fixed. As people adapt public projects for personal and commercial use (and why shouldn't they--they paid for it!), they will offer enhancements and suggestions that could advance such projects well beyond the pace of current scenarios. And lastly, such a move would help seed a new industry of open-source software development shops. In a world where analysts constantly wonder where the money is in open source, development such as I'm describing would increase the viability ofsuch businesses and would encourage conventional shops to consider the merits of open source. Even if such shops charge the same fees as proprietary project vendors, the public policy benefits have value. I'm not asking for governments to give specific tax funding to open-sourceprojects. All I'm suggesting is that governments, as their ultimatepunishment of Microsoft, do what it takes in their own procurement and IT policies to make open availability of source code a desirable feature in future requests forproposals (RFPs) and other software-related tenders. In other words, what I'm proposing is merely the acceleration of a process already started. The spread of open source software within their own procurement policies is the best way for governments--at any level--to punish Microsoft and its partners in crime. Do you think open source should become a part of public IT policy? TellEvan in the TalkBack below or in the ZDNetLinux Forum. Or write to Evan directly at evan@starnix.com.
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