Andrew Plato wrote:
>I still don't understand why this legislation is necessary. The State
>already has the option to consider and use open-source.
>
Because commercial software has marketing money to pay for salesmen to
push the stuff on civil servents: take people to lunch, drop by with
informative pamphlets, present "analysis" showing how some particular
commercial solution is just right for some situation.
Open source software, in contrast, basically just sits there on its
merits, with no one to sell it. Only really pro-active civil servants go
out of their way to seek out these lower-cost alternative solutions
instead of just accepting one of the commercial suitors that show up on
their doorstep.
This bill levels the playing field by forcing civil servants to at least
*consider* open source alternatives where such exists. They don't have
to choose them, they just have to demonstrate that they considered open
source alternatives, and found cause that some proprietary solution is
actually better.
>Before such a law is put on the books, I think these issues (and others)
>need to be clarified. I think Mr. Starr should hold off on this bill until
>the ramifications of such legislation can be more appropriately addressed.
>
I think that issue was adequately clarified long ago. You can argue "not
worth it" or "I don't care" or "bad for the economy"; those points are
all debatable estimations. But you can't argue "what for?"
On the "bad/good for the economy" front:
* IMHO open source solutions would save the State government a *lot*
of money. Money for commercial software is being wasted by State
govt. merely because the government consumers of IT don't know
that they could save money by chosing these relatively obscure
alternatives.
* IMHO, government use of open source software would increase money
spent on local consultants to do customization, at the expense of
money spent on commercial licenses which mostly just leave the
state. So increased use of open source strengthens local
economies: think globally, act locally.
* IMHO Oregon's software industry is richer than most in the open
source sector. In contrast, Washington's economy is clearly
dominated by Microsoft. So this bill is good for the Oregon
economy, and bad for the Washington economy. I'm ok with that :)
Crispin
--
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D. http://immunix.com/~crispin/
Chief Scientist, Immunix http://immunix.com
http://www.immunix.com/shop/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Jul 31 2003 - 09:51:48 PDT