FOSS Good for America, even good for Microsoft

[voidmain]

http://www.theregus.com/content/4/26796.html
 

quote:
Open Source is good for America - US military advised
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 10/29/2002 at 03:30 EST

A report commissioned by the US military concludes that open source and free software should play a greater part in the infrastructure of the world's remaining superpower.

Mitre Corporation's 152-page study addresses the extent of software libre, or FOSS-licensed software use - FOSS being "Free and Open Source Software", an acronym uncomfortably evocative to this author of dental hygiene - in various branches of the military.

It's all over the place already, conclude the authors, and there should be more of it.

"In the long term removing FOSS would remove an important source of price and quality competition. Without the constant pressure of low-cost, high-quality FOSS product competing with the closed-source products, the closed-source vendors could more easily fall into a cycle in which their support costs balloon and costs are passed on to their locked-in customers."

Why?

"... to promote product diversity. FOSS applications tend to be much lower in cost than their proprietary equivalents, yet they often provide high levels of functionality with good user acceptance."

That doesn't mean software libre should be compulsory. It works best, notes Mitre, when people find the software and not vice versa. It rejects making it mandatory and notes that when users were "force fitted" to use a free software product for ideological reasons- the gcc compiler features in an example cited - the result might not be satisfactory.

The report recommends the DoD create a "safe list" of approved products, encourage interoperability with commercial software, and promote it all round as A Good Thing.

There are a couple of interesting aspects to Mitre's conclusions. The report doesn't take a side on Microsoft's argument that a commercial model sustains long term development and better support. That argument has been articulated by open source advocates who have little common cause with Redmond, such as Larry McVoy, whose BitKeeper product is used to maintain the Linux kernel.

But it does torpedo one of Microsoft's more emotive arguments: that the GPL is a toxic, capitalist-munching virus.

"A common assumption about FOSS licenses such as GPL is that their transitive user rights means they cannot be used with non-FOSS (e.g., government or proprietary) software," notes Mitre. "However, this is generally not the case; such mixing can generally be done in various ways. For example, even GPL with its strong protection of transitive user rights provides a number of mechanisms to allow such mixing."

Mitre then explains how "Microsoft provides a good example of an innovative use of one such mixing strategy in their Windows Services for Unix (SFU)6 product. This product uses proprietary software to build an initial bridge between Windows and UNIX operating systems, and then adds in GPL tools and utilities to extend greatly its overall emulation of UNIX. Users benefit from the extended functionality provided by the GPL components, while Microsoft benefits by avoiding the cost and time of re-developing the tools as proprietary software. "

See. It's even good for Microsoft.

[hm_murdock]

Gates is just scared. He's one of these new-age ubercapitalists. Profits are more important than people to worthless scum such as they.

The military loves Open Source, for the very reason that it can be easily adapted to new hardware and new roles. They can rest assured of its security, because they can go and look at the code, and then make any improvements they need to. They can develop in-house quickly and easily by incorporating parts of other things, therefore ensuring interoperability.

For someone like them, anything but open source is a bad idea.

[voidmain]

I know that and you know that but the US military is a lot like corporate America in many ways (I spent 15 years in the military). I used open source in the military much like I used it in my corporate life. Nobody really knew the extent to which the company depended on open souce, especially the pointy head types. At the time I had to be very careful about mentioning that fact. Now it's much more accepted. However, the pointy heads (which includes military heads) like big IT budgets and think spending a lot of money is fun. Hopefully surveys like these will get to the top brass and make them think a little.

You are correct, in *many* ways open source is the way to go, it certainly made me a hero countless times in my places of work. Sometimes proprietary software is necessary when you are in a pinch but OSS alternatives should be checked in to before dropping cash on proprietary lock-in.

[ October 29, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]