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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Slipping the Bonds

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts was at the eye of a storm recently when their intent to promote open standards raised a howl of protest from the forces of bondage. They held a meeting for vendors and affected parties (no press) on Wednesday chaired by Eric Kriss (Secretary of Administration & Finance) and Dan Bricklin has kindly provided notes. Reading these one wonders what all the fuss is about. The Commonwealth is crippled by a legacy of vendor control:

The State is suffering from old programs on proprietary or ancient platforms. They have lock-in to an extraordinary degree, where they can't even get some data on a screen, let alone share it. New young programmers don't know early COBOL. The State has become subject to the whims (and fortunes) of companies in the marketplace.

So is it surprise they want to slip the bonds and chart a future course that avoids this issue? Of course, the hot topic was that they were going to 'mandate' open source. As it turns out, that's not the case:

The State is explicitly saying to its people that when possible use Open Source (for the reasons above), evaluating it on a level playing field with alternatives. If a given Open Source product (like Apache or Linux) is known to be robust, widely used, etc., it should be considered, though not required if alternatives meet the Open Standards tests and overall real-cost is competitive.

In other words, open source is not mandated, it's just explicitly not forbidden. Of course, this is a huge competitive threat to vested interests - how can something like IBM's DB2 compete with open source on price, for example - but entirely fair. I'm impressed by the balance and good sense Kriss is showing, hopefully his example will be repeated by state governments throughout the US (as it usually is).

posted at 4:40 PM (UK) | |