Simon Phipps has some suggestions -- five to be exact -- for promoting more side scale adoption of open source software, which he lists in his blog Five Ideas to Get FOSS into Governments. He originally made the comments in his keynote address in Oslo at GoOpen 2009.

1. Procurement is a two-phase process. First off, buy prototyping and iterating; secondly, buy production deployment and scaling. As Phipps puts it, software is more than just "something you buy a license for."

2. As a matter of course, publish the names of the vendors who submit tenders for any implementation. Use Freedom of Information Act petitions if need be to let the sunshine in on the bidding process.

3. Know what it's going to cost you to leave a vendor of proprietary solutions. Working in the dark on this issue only makes the lock-in tighter.

4. Don't be fooled by one-time cost cutting. Demand the freedom to use/study/modify/distribute the software. "If you have [this] freedom ... you can drive down the costs - freedom can lead to cost savings but cost savings rarely lead to freedom. Making this the rule is a policy decision that your legislature needs to make," Phipps asserts.

5. Don't settle for solutions that require proprietary formats -- DRM as an enabler to tracking; closed and NDA-only interfaces (and many more tactics) -- will surely be costly to users who follow in your footsteps. "Demand transparency with privacy. That's freedom; secrecy with controlled disclosure is not. Discriminate against offerings that use DRM, unpublished interfaces and anything else that your vendor won't let you publish without permission."

There, in five easy steps, the way to promote FOSS where it is needed most, in government operations. Phipps does add that use of open standards also will provide value. "...a great rule of thumb is if it could be implemented under all available open source licenses and is actually implemented under one, it's probably open," he extends. "And if you use the open source implementation, chances are the extra freedoms will help too."

More Information

Wikipedia on Free and open source software [...read more...]

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