MESSAGE
| DATE | 2002-06-13 |
| FROM | From: "News"
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [hangout] MITRE Study on Open Source in Government
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Rob Roblimo article on Newsforge:
http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/06/11/1423244
MITRE Study pdf download:
http://www.mitre.org/support/papers/tech_papers_01/kenwood_software/index.sh
tml
Topic - Open Source - - By Robin "Roblimo" Miller -
This 63-page study was sponsored by the U.S. Army, presumably to help the
Army make cost-effective software purchasing decisions. It has had plenty of
lead-up publicity since it was written in July 2001, but is only now widely
available for public viewing. It's nothing like the study recently put out
by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution that seems to consist of
warmed-over Microsoft marketing rhetoric. Read on for a brief synopsis and
analysis, along with my personal take on what all this means.
The first thing to note here is that MITRE gets most of its funding from the
Department of Defense and other government agencies, while the Alexis de
Tocqueville Institution gets the bulk of its money from private sources,
including Microsoft. In this case, you might say, MITRE is taking the
customer's view while AdTI is talking from the vendor's viewpoint. It is as
if MITRE is taking the car buyer's side while AdTI is taking the car
salesman's, except that the stakes here are much greater than the purchase
of a single automobile. Anyway, here are some of the primary points made in
the MITRE study:
* Open Source is not new, but has been around since the 1960s; Emacs,
the GNU toolset, Apache, Sendmail, Linux, and Perl are in wide use in the
government already.
* Open Source software patches/bugfixes/updates happen "potentially an
order of magnitude faster than those of commercial software," and, "because
the source code is publicly available, Program Managers can have their code
tailored to meet their specific needs and tightly control system resources.
This enables Program Managers to concentrate on developing the features
unique to their current task, instead of spending their effort on
re-thinking and re-writing code that has already been developed by others."
* Cost comparisons are made between Commercial Off the Shelf Software
(COTS) and unmodified Open Source Software (OSS), Modifiable COTS and
lightly modified OSS, and between Custom Code (CC) and thoroughly modified,
owner-maintained OSS. Open Source wins in some cases, but not in others.
* Linux desktop shortcomings are not glossed over. The study says,
"Significant investments in areas such as ease of use and configuration are
needed for Linux to achieve success on desktops." [Remember, this was
written in early and mid-2001; advances since then have been amazing ... ed]
* Windows has advantages that include effective marketing, ease of use,
and user familiarity across servers and desktops. Comparing Windows to Unix,
the report says, "Organizations that do not plan for growth often choose
Windows for its low initial cost of entry, while organizations that plan for
aggressive growth upfront may choose Unix. Therefore, the optimal choice of
Windows versus Unix depends on the number of users the system supports. As
the number of users increases to over 1,000, Unix becomes the most effective
platform, or optimal platform choice." The next paragraph mentions the
commercial world's shift from Unix to Linux, and also notes, "If more
Program Managers compared OSS to traditional COTS for their specific
business case, it is likely that there would be many more users of OSS
today."
* "OSS provides more options than traditional COTS for life-cycle
supportability, particularly for long-lived systems."
* Big mention of and boost for Linux in embedded systems; the Abrams
Tanks and Army Tactical Operations Centers are both mentioned as examples.
* Report conclusion: "... open source methods and products are well worth
considering seriously in a wide range of government applications,
particularly if they are applied with care and a solid understanding of the
risks they entail. OSS encourages significant software development and code
re-use, can provide important economic benefits, and has the potential for
especially large direct and indirect cost savings for military systems that
require large deployments of costly software products."
A frightening series of thoughts
Put yourself in a proprietary developer's shoes. Imagine running a software
development house that concentrates on producing custom applications for
government agencies. (There are lots of these around the Washington, D.C.,
area.) For many years, you have written software for one agency, then bid on
projects for other agencies and you have been low bidder on most of the
subsequent contracts because you reuse the proprietary code you developed
for the first contract. Competitors must start from scratch, so you have a
huge leg up by virtue of owning some unique and useful code. You live in the
outer suburbs and drive a Mercedes. Your business is stable and looks like
it is going to be profitable for the rest of your life. You are thinking
about buying or building a vacation home in the Bahamas in addition to the
ones you already own in Colorado and Maine.
Now someone is coming along and telling you that you should open all your
source code to the rest of the world, in effect giving your competitors a
chance to bid against you fairly, and possibly win contracts that would
almost be yours by default if you didn't have to share your source code. You
are suddenly faced with the possibility that you are going to have to cut
your profit margins significantly to stay in business.
Your immediate reaction is anger. The Bahamas house dream fades. Fear
follows the anger. What if some bunch of developers with no overhead manage
to underbid you on two or three contracts in a row? Good-bye, Colorado and
Maine vacation retreats, and when you limit the Saks 5th Avenue credit card
account, good-bye Trophy Wife, too. The future, once so rosy, is suddenly a
frightening place, one where you may be forced to keep your Mercedes for
three years instead of turning it in after one; where you will be forced to
live in a 15-room house on a half-acre lot instead of adding on to your
30-room Horse Country manor on its 50 rolling acres.
So you fight. Of course you do. Hard.
Meanwhile, on the government side, the idea that a more humble programming
group reusing Open Source code can bid as little as one tenth as much as the
proprietary software magnate and do as good a job and a better long-term job
of code maintenance looks great. Because others can freely use the original
Open Source bidder's code, subsequent bids will all be fully competitive,
which will keep prices down. The programmers will still want to make decent
livings, and will want their families to have 10- or 15-room houses on half
acre lots in suburban communities with good schools, and that's fine. They
work hard and deserve to live well in return.
What gets wrung out of the system when government turns to Open Source is
not code quality, and it certainly isn't security (remember, the vast
majority of government systems that get compromised run proprietary
operating systems and software), but is the taxpayers' contribution to
proprietary software magnates' personal wealth.
We can hardly blame the proprietary honchos for wanting to hang on to their
lifestyles, and we should sympathize with their efforts to get government
agencies to keep subsidizing them. These plutocrats are going to lobby,
donate, create and distribute studies, hire PR firms, and use every other
trick of modern American political marketing to fight off the Open Source
hordes lapping at their mansion doors.
Against all this proprietary political power, you have the Open Source
promise of more efficient, lower cost, more reliable, and more secure
government software, which benefits both the people in the government
agencies who must use and maintain that software, and the taxpayers whose
money buys it.
Which side will win? Or is it necessary for one side to win and the other to
lose? The proprietary powers are certainly painting all this as a battle
where even the slightest bit of Open Source -- or worse, GPL-licensed Free
Software -- infection will ruin the government's entire code base and throw
the virtual doors to every federal data center open to laptop-wielding
robe-wearers who scream "Death to All USians" in Iraqi, Iranian or North
Korean accents as they destroy our country's IT infrastructure.
I'd like to think our government people are too sensible to believe this
silly scenario, even if it is presented to them along with $10,000 campaign
contribution checks while riding to "briefings" in Hawaii in so-and-so
company's jet, drinking corporate-bought 100-year-old Scotch and smoking
corporate-supplied, illegally imported cigars hand-rolled by Fidel Castro
himself.
But we'll see how it all plays out. I personally expect slow but steady
gains for Open Source in the U.S. government, but I also expect to see
plenty of bones still thrown to the proprietary software plutocrats, if only
because the current U.S. system of campaign finance and (shall we say)
"lobbyist-aided decision making" might collapse without their involvement,
and we wouldn't want that.
Or would we? Hmmm.....
____________________________
New Yorker Linux Users Scene
Fair Use -
because it's either fair use or useless....
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