Wikileaks has leaked a draft of a report by an OSS working group representing industry. It appears to be a very divisive document, perhaps intended to fragment the global FLOSS community:
- The draft points out that EU has done a lot in FLOSS but US corporations are making the profits
- The draft points out that FLOSS cannot be zero cost. What has this to do with EU strategy?
- “There is no clear distinction between closed source and open source.”
- “Commoditization if the opposite of innovation.”
- “Open Source will never be THE solution which will modify the whole economy and the IT world.”
- “Why all the benefit from OpenSource is mainly for non-European countries?”
- “tenders preferring or mandating OpenSource software or narrowly defined open standards, according to the view of leading software trade associations, can be in violation of the same neutrality principles.”
It’s a long document, 37 pages, and while showing a discussion is happening contains such bizarre viewpoints (not unlike one of our commenters) that I do not see it contributing much towards establishing an EU policy on FLOSS. GNU/Linux is doing very well in EU and the divisive issues raised are typical strawmen in that they are essentially irrelevant to the adoption of FLOSS. That is, the cost of making GNU/Linux available to everyone divided by the potential number of installations (billions) is trivial in comparison to the cost of non-free software and the deadly weight of support it needs (anti-malware, licensing, lawyers, salesmen and techs). In my school, for instance, we were dead in the water with that other OS. Half the machines were not working. By adopting FLOSS, we can triple the number of existing machines, and increase the number of working machines five-fold with no increase in costs. GNU/Linux is also sustainable because the whole world shares in the cost of production and we are many.
I hope the final version of this report is reasonable but I am not optimistic. Fortunately, the EU is advancing in adoption of FLOSS faster than the writers of the report can revise.
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If Linux and open source are gonna make great success in Europe it’s surely not because EU but – i think so – despite EU. But like some of our essayist once wrote: “when money run out the thinking begins.” That’s the greatest allie of Linux and Open Source. I won’t give much honour to EU.
Pog:
It might be worth your time to read the final report at
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda/index_en.htm
What you will find is a that outlines challenges without speaking about implementations.
And this is as it should be.
I cannot find a “final” version of any such report.
There is a summary policy at
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/informatics/about/oss_tech/index_en.htm
and a site dedicated to sharing software and information about FLOSS at
http://www.osor.eu/
It does not seem to me that there is a final OSS Strategy document. I suspect the wikileaks document was for internal use only and was one of many such reports. The “Digital Agenda” is a more general topic about the vision for IT in the EU. The idea of FLOSS seems well accepted by most governments of the EU.
“The idea of FLOSS seems well accepted by most governments of the EU.”
As is commercial software. The best tool for the job Pog.
Some FLOSS is commercial software.
The problems many governments see with non-FLOSS is that the software is working for an outside party, phoning home, locking-in file formats/protocols, sniffing around and so on. That is quite unacceptable to sovereign entities that want to be masters of their own houses. FLOSS gives them that power. Governments also want the benefits of using IT/software/hardware to be given to their country, not foreigners. A lot of non-FLOSS doesn’t fit that way of thinking.
Malware is another huge issue for governments. We just had a scare here. We are a government-run school. The machine with the students’ records on it was found not to be updating its anti-virus, an indication of malware these days. It’s an XP machine. We can back up software and data. We can run anti-virus and paranoid firewalls but we cannot keep our data safe with XP. The only reason we run that OS for that data is because another branch of government wants us to run a Java app with MySQL (both FLOSS) and the Java app is M$-only. Go figure. They must have C:\ hard-coded all over the app.
Then there are file formats. We have some old documents in .wks and it’s a pain to convert each one to .xls or .ods. The data belongs to us, not M$.
Where I work, there is no killer app that must be run on that other OS and we do not really need any non-FLOSS app to get the job done. FLOSS is just a better way to do IT for us.