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I'm working on a document (very early stage) with the hopes of it turning into a very thorough and convincing argument as to why government entities should switch to FOSS. I need help because:
- I have small kids, so I have little time :(
- There is a lot I probably don't know about
- Open source!
Currently, the document is not public because:
- I don't want to see preemptive action against it by you know who
- I don't want to see certain journalists picking up something bad someone might have temporarily added and turn it into this whole thing against the FOSS community
My plan for this document is:
- Collaborate on Google doc until it reaches a decent state
- Port to LaTeX and put it up on Gitlab
- Once completed in English, do the following in parallel:
* Announce it and invite FOSS enthusiasts to forward it to their MPs (Member of Parliament as they call them in Canada)
* Add build toggles and relevant arguments to adapt the document to other entities such as "large companies", "small businesses", "municipalities", etc.
* Have it translated to other languages. I'm hoping this could be done professionally as it would be hard to verify the translations and avoid a malicious contributor to sabotage the translation.
What I'm looking for is collaborators who:
- are level-headed. This is not going to be a hate filled rant.
- have a lot to say / know a lot of stories. I intend to rely on many examples of FOSS success and closed-source software failures.
Good writers are welcome to improve the writing. Good-with-maths are welcome to help with cost models, graphs and all the fancy attractive stuff.
Please send me a private message in GoL with your email and a bit about what you know, and what you would like to say and I'll share the doc with you.
---
P.S. Why target governments first?
- They are technically public servants, so in-the-public's-interest arguments can probably go a longer way. Companies are probably going to be harder to convince given that switch to FOSS is long term and they don't like risks.
- Governments are more likely to have secrets they don't want NSA to pry about.
- Governments have a large number of employees, so the exposure of non-tech people to FOSS would be higher.
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One government-specific argument I liked, mostly for countries outside the US, is that using FOSS means you can hire local talent to improve and fix your software instead of relying on foreign companies. So in addition to avoiding licensing costs, you create local jobs, foster those skills in your population, and keep much tighter control over the features you need (you can always fork and choose whether or not to share upstream if the community edition doesn’t align with your use case). In other words, using FOSS is not truly costless (for a government), but the spending is done internally. And if you do share upstream, your contributions also benefit other users of that software in the population (and internationally).
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An apparently reasonably successful campaign by the FSFE.
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Especially if its so sell FOSS to governmental representative. There will be people who will put every single FOSS weaknesses under a microscope and you need to be prepared for that so you can counter argument.
For example one of the major weakness of a lot of FOSS software are being a one man project. The day said "man" don't want to do that anymore, most of the time the project is as good as dead. And that is not very reassuring for a lot of people to contemplate the possibility that a software they like/need may disappear one day.
Another problem is the famous XKCD "standards" comic https://xkcd.com/927/. Even if forking is a strength it can also be a weakness. Each project doing its little own recipe of the same thing in its corner not looking at others. Completely exploding resources all over the place making things move more slowly than they could be.
Last edited by DerpFox on 27 April 2020 at 3:33 pm UTC
Traditionally this is more of a problem in the proprietary software world. We all know how much corporations like their lock-in schemes and proprietary file formats. That XKCD strip is not about open source, but about standards in general. Some notable problem cases are mentioned in the subtitle.
Don't get me wrong, there are several aspects of open source that governments and corporations will see as weaknesses. And some of them will be easier to refute than others.
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Also, it's all too common thay the government contracts someone for some proprietary software, then are left with it with zero support and all the bugs. Same could happen with open source in the worst case, so it cannot be worse than how they already work.
By all means please elaborate.
Last edited by ShabbyX on 26 April 2020 at 6:04 pm UTC
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I thinks you've misunderstood me. I'm sorry I should have been clearer. I know that this kind of project is not chosen by governments. I was saying that as a warning, people who will lobby against FOSS will do anything they can, even going as low as that. One just need to be prepared, because the majority of people are computer illiterate, if some people with charisma manage to convince them that this is the norm they will shut like a clam and push FOSS away for good. I've lived that a couple time and once people who are not tech savy are set on something its close to impossible to make them move.
I had that problem a couple of times "but I read in [a magazine article written by some one who has no clue about what they talk about] that [the thing] is bad", or you should see my country politician when they talk about anything computer related its really really bad, in 2006 I remember the "open office firewall". Even if things has gotten better in the past decade it is still bad
As much as we know and as little it can be compared to some *nix guru out there, we should expect other people to know a 1000 times less.
Same for the XKCD comic I only used it as an example. But I'm sorry FOSS even is not as bad as proprietary softwares in the general mater of creating a separate projects, a separate norm, standard ect. It can do it, and its a door open to attack. And again the average computer illiterate will take that literally.
In the case of pushing governments acceptance of FOSS we should not forget that we are against lobbies who won't hesitate to fight dirty. They will make non issue into issue.
For example in my country there is a law that force any governments related group to open a public market to choose a new software. Unfortunately the law is old and is written in a way that prevent people to present FOSS sofwares. These kind of public market are only open to buisnesses, so simple citizen would would just present a FOSS softwares are out. Then there is not much company that develop the kind of ultra specialised softwares that are needed by governement so most of the time there is no company that would make a FOSS software and try to sell a support plan for it. That let us with the usual couple same softwares since 30 years. And you can be sure there few companies are fighting hard to keep things as they are.
I'm not sure if I've been clear in that tho. We are fighting against companies that have governement contract that they live on for decades without doing any innovation. they won't let there money mine go away easely.
I meant that while you'll have some excellent technical, ethical and even financial points to make, there are other complications at play that are not as straight-forward.
You'll face annoying questions in the vein of: "If we're not paying someone for a software license, who takes responsibility" or "Everyone else uses <name-of-proprietary-software>, doesn't that mean it's the best choice?". Some of these assumptions are very difficult to challenge with facts, even if it seems like the answers should be obvious. You will need some serious sales skills to pull that off.
Then there's the fact that decision makers in political entities like governments, large or local, might have various reasons not to rock the boat. They also often base their decisions on different criteria than a business entity would. This last point can be a positive as well in some cases.
I know I'm not being very specific or helpful, but this is all I can manage off the cuff right now.
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Edit: words
Last edited by Samsai on 27 April 2020 at 10:11 am UTC