Open Source Policy and Open Source

The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology & Logistics recently published the "Open Technology Development Roadmap Plan", another step towards moving the military to open standards, if not open source. This is going to be a long road, given that they can't even publish their own objectives in an open standard. The document makes the business case for open source: it argues how the DoD can do it's job better using open source. To quote from the report:

[Open source software] and open source development methodologies are important to the National Security and National Interest of the U.S. for the following reasons:

1. Enhances agility of IT industries to more rapidly adapt and change to user needed capabilities.
2. Strengthens the industrial base by not protecting industry from competition.
3. Makes industry more likely to compete on ideas and execution versus product lock-in.
4. Adoption recognizes a change in our position with regard to balance of trade1 of IT.
5. Enables DoD to secure the infrastructure and increase security by understanding what is actually in the source code of software installed in DoD networks.
6. Rapidly respond to adversary actions as well as rapid changes in the technology industrial base.

It also mentions that China wants to become an open source leader. Are they hoping that military types who won't respond to issues of effectiveness, cost and fitness for purpose will be motivated by "us and them" competition?

Day one of the OSS Watch went very well, rihgt up to the conference in the dining hall at Exeter College, which dates from 1618. The dark, wood-panelled part you can see at the far end of the hall is the choir gallery, dating from when all the Oxford colleges were primarily religious rather than primarily academic institutions.

Whatever drawbacks Oxford may have as a place to live, a place to work or a place to hold events, there is not lack of history and no lack of architecture.

A slightly updated version of my presentation for the SIGOSSEE conference is on the web.

I'm about to leave for the Open Source for Education in Europe Conference in Heerlen.

I hope to be able to blog more from there, depending on network connectivity.

OSS Watch has a new website. The previous website was built around what we thought OSS Watch would become, the new website is built around what OSS Watch is. So if you're looking for balanced and authoritative advice on open source in post-compulsory education in the UK, look no further.

On the technical side, the new website is a new set of XSLT stylesheets and navigational documents around the previous content, plus some new content and branding. Since the textual content is all in TEI XML, repurposing the documents was little or no hassle whatsoever.

The site has been live for a couple of days.

Gilberto Gil, the serving culture minister of Brazil, has been in London talking about open source and intellectual property. In an interview with the Guardian, he talks about music, politics and IPR.

The kernel of the issue is that in less developed countries the economics of software production are completely altered by the significantly lower costs of labour, which is made significantly worse by the move to selling software as a service and licensing it on a per-individual basis. Coupled with this are the facts that very little of the money is spent locally and that local independent companies are frequently caught in the cross fire by incumbent monopolies' efforts to strengthen their monopolies using closed formats and limited interoperability.

As a result, Brazil and Peru but have policies supporting open source, and Ubuntu has exploded out of Africa.

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) (which is funded by top-slicing the UK higher and further education funding councils) has released a policy on open source. Many centrally funded development, IT pilot, interoperability, and infrastructure projects are likely to fall under this new policy.

To be clear, the new policy does not prevent funded projects from developing closed source, proprietary, software on closed source, proprietary, platforms. What it does do is force projects to state up-front what licences they intend to use and then follow software engineering and IPR best-practices during the project.

The National Center for Open Source Policy and Research (NCOSPR) has been founded by the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) at the University of Southern Mississippi.

The Financial Times is covering open source in an article by Richard Waters of detailing the take up of open ideas by blue clip IT companies such as and Sun. These companies want to "innovate" i.e. generate and test new ideas faster. There is a quote from a Microsoft employee:

PayThyme from Clockwork Software has been used by 1315 employers to file over 215,000 employee P14 returns to HM Revenue and Customs. Some of the components of the open source software are officially recognised and others are undergoing the Accreditation process.

Financial and accounting software has traditionally been a challenging area for open source software because the requirements are specific to each jurisdiction and need to be updated every tax year, in addition, the potentially very high cost of accounting errors makes for a conservative outlook. Clockwork appear to to have overcome these issues by moving to a service-based business model.

In what is becoming a standard tactic, the open source nature of the software is downplayed on the main website, with all the open source, community and technical aspects relegated to a second site aimed at technical people rather than the target users (in this case bookkeepers and accountants): http://www.paythyme.org.uk/.