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posted by azrael on Wednesday October 22 2014, @05:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the stop-throwing-good-money-after-bad dept.

The European Union's interoperability page reports:

The Dutch government must increase its use of open source software, recommends the country's parliament. It wants to make open standards mandatory and use open source when equal to or better than proprietary solutions for all [Information and Communications Technology] projects over 5 million euro.

The government must enforce compliance with its existing policy on open source software and open standards, the parliament recommends in its final report on failures of government ICT projects. Enforcing the 'comply or explain' policy is to become a [task] for a new agency, overseeing all government ICT projects.

"The government has already agreed to opt for open source and open standards, wherever possible. Only, in practice, this happens too little. This has to change - open source and open standards can result in major cost savings, but they also open the door to dissenting voices", the parliament writes. Such criticism is to be encouraged, and one of the ways to achieve this is to use open source, enabling outsiders to think along.

[...]The parliament wants the government to report the savings it realises by using open source. This is to become part of the annual business reports of the government.

[...]The Dutch government has been encouraging the use of open source and open standards for over ten years. There was an action plan, two government programmes, a board, an expert forum and a report by the Court of Audit, the committee's report summarises. "Recent years, however, have been pretty quiet."

Robert Pogson put a finer point on this:

The Netherlands, alone, has seen billions of Euros squandered each year due to failed ICT projects. It is so easy to sign a cheque and hope problems will disappear, but that abstraction allows a lot of waste such as paying for permission to run computers the government owns outright.

By using FLOSS, a huge slice of costs is eliminated. Better management will take care of the rest, but opening ICT projects to competition surely reduces costs and promotes local businesses boosting GDP and tax-revenue.

ICT that is a revenue generator rather than a cost is the pot of gold for governments everywhere. ICT should not be a conveyor-belt of money flowing to M$ and "partners". That's not the purpose. Finding, modifying, creating, and distributing information as efficiently as possible is the only valid justification for money spend on ICT.

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  • (Score: 2) by jimshatt on Wednesday October 22 2014, @08:03PM

    by jimshatt (978) on Wednesday October 22 2014, @08:03PM (#108850) Journal
    In my opinion, costs savings should only be a secondary goal. Keeping your documents safe by using open standards, or your IT projects safe by avoiding vendor lock-ins is much, much more important. In the end, one hopes that that saves costs too.
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday October 22 2014, @08:30PM

      by frojack (1554) on Wednesday October 22 2014, @08:30PM (#108863) Journal

      In that regard, the easiest path to more use of opensource is to simply require ALL documents stored on their systems to be in ODF formats, and disallow Microsoft Specific formats, or Microsoft proprietary extensions of ODF formats.

      Once people get over their obsession with Word and Excel, and start saving documents ONLY in open formats, they will also get used to not using any of those problematic (and virtually always unnecessary) scripting add ons that are in effect, the lockin.

      Microsoft's newest products can store in Open Formats [imgur.com] and these can even be made the default. If you lose some functionality, deal with, or complain to MS.

      Office and Outlook are the anchor that Microsoft uses to assure the lock-in. Deprive them of the lock-in and let the market decide if LibreOffice or OpenOffice or some Microsoft's offerings will carry the day. Some will choose to continue with Outlook (I know people who never leave outlook, they log in in the morning and stay there all day. They literally know nothing else).

      You don't have to outlaw Word, Excel, just make them play by the same rules. The cost and quality issues will sort the details out.

      --
      No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
      • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday October 22 2014, @09:30PM

        by Nerdfest (80) on Wednesday October 22 2014, @09:30PM (#108899)

        The problem (for Microsoft) is that as soon as you start using open formats you no longer require Microsoft Office. This is important, as when you don't need Office, you really no longer need Windows (in many cases) and you start to be able to allow people to use Linux, OSX, etc. Using open formats is probably the most important step is getting out of the Microsoft lock-in.

        • (Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday October 22 2014, @09:49PM

          by frojack (1554) on Wednesday October 22 2014, @09:49PM (#108911) Journal

          Using open formats is probably the most important step is getting out of the Microsoft lock-in.

          Exactly my point.

          But you don't have to fight that Microsoft vs Linux battle. Too much gunfire from deep pockets, too much wailing and gnashing of teeth and moaning about retraining costs.

          Just fight the little battle of required storage format. Its quiet, local, and under the radar. Once they realize Office provides no functionality not already available form OO or LO, they will stop buying Office.

          Maybe they will choose to stay with Windows, Maybe not. Who knows, Windows 10 might be a pretty good OS. But the key is breaking up the issue into small win-able battles.

          --
          No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by choose another one on Wednesday October 22 2014, @08:41PM

      by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 22 2014, @08:41PM (#108869)

      So, open standards is primary, no vendor lock-in is secondary, cost is tertiary... and ability to actually do the job is where ? last ?

      - Cost is _a_ requirement
      - No vendor lock-in is _a_ requirement
      - Open standards is _a_ requirement
      - Support is _a_ requirement
      - Vendor capability and financial stability are requirements
      - Features and capabilities * n are requirements

      Decide on your requirements, prioritise them, score the tender responses and pick the best overall balance for you. Then whenever someone demands to know "why didn't you pick X" ("comply or explain") all you have to do is show your process and scoring leading to your decision.

      This is procurement 101 FFS. If they aren't _already doing this_, then they are almost certainly breaking EU procurement rules anyway.

      As for Pogson, who appears to be a teacher with zero experience of large public sector IT procurement from either side, similar comments apply:

      "opening ICT projects to competition surely reduces costs and promotes local businesses boosting GDP and tax-revenue."

      Which is why it is _already_ mandatory to do that. In fact attempting to avoid a full scale tendering process in public sector IT is a royal PITA requiring waivers signed in triplicate, in blood, by every layer of management including past future and dead.

      By using FLOSS, a huge slice of costs is eliminated

      *snort*. Oh please, these big IT projects are always heavily customized, usually several times over as the customer changes their mind, and they are big and complicated and expensive so the people cost a lot too. Licence costs are dwarfed by consultancy, and internal organizational project costs usually dwarf that. I've worked on a bunch of 7 and 8 figure bids (which is small fry in this game) and often licence costs were under 10%, and that's for perpetual licence vs. initial project cost, by the time you are looking at 10 or 20yr TCO it is even less. Huge slice, what is he on (well, maybe he's on Oracle...) ?

  • (Score: 2) by crutchy on Wednesday October 22 2014, @08:55PM

    by crutchy (179) on Wednesday October 22 2014, @08:55PM (#108876) Homepage Journal

    ....this is what xlefay has been up to :D

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 23 2014, @11:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 23 2014, @11:40AM (#109122)

    I don't get it: There are hundreds of thousands of libraries around the world with pretty much the exact same requirements. And a large chunk of those pay licensing fees for some crappy proprietary product that almost does what they want. Why don't these pool their fees for one season and have a free software written to do the job? They'd never ever have to pay another dime and they would get software that does exactly what they need and nothing else.

    Ditto police stations, schools, hospitals, NGOs... you name it.

    Proprietary software is such a waste and a racket.

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday October 23 2014, @04:03PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday October 23 2014, @04:03PM (#109229) Journal

      Yep. That applies to absolutely every industry. Problem is one of two things:

      1) In some industries their special software is written in-house. They consider it part of their proprietary advantage. These guys are unlikely to open source.

      2) The rest of them have no software developers, so they wouldn't know how to begin a project like this. They just buy software. A good salesman could probably sell a bunch of libraries on an open source approach like you suggested and act as the middle-man to facilitate this kind of development...but most people willing to do that are greedy enough that they figure they'll make more money keeping the software locked up and charging royalty fees.