| An alternative to so-called "Open Source Bills" |
by Johannes Lessmann (Sep. 23, 2003)
In the recent past we hear a lot about law proposals that intend to enforce the usage or at least consideration of open source software for government procurements. Australia, Oregon, Texas, Spain and Brazil are prominent examples of such kinds of bills. In most cases there is only little acceptance on the side of politicians and vehement resistance from lobby groups like the Business Software Alliance or the Institute for Software Choice. The bottom line one hears is always the same: governments do already consider open source software and thus don't need a particular law which is perceived preferential to open source software anyway. Software should be purchased based on merit and not because it is open source or proprietary.
In my opinion, these arguments are principally right. I don't think we need laws that enforce certain types of software. To me, there is an approach which seems to be more promising and, most importantly, fair. This approach refers to the (electronic) documents which are exchanged between different parties.
As a PhD student, I recently tried to submit a research paper to a computer science conference. I was surprised to realize that only Word documents were accepted. No PDF, no alternative proprietary formats. This is what I'm talking about: the type of exchanged documents. A world where only Word documents are accepted is in fact preferential. What had happened if I'd had no Word or even Windows? No chance to participate at the conference. Not because my paper had been bad. Just because I'd not been able to afford the right software.
If electronic tax declarations must be submitted using Excel sheets (I don't know if that is the case or makes sense but you get the point), companies are forced to buy Excel to benefit from the cost savings. If company X has four trading partners which require Word documents to be used when exchanging information, company X will have to buy Word, as well. No chance to use Linux on the desktop (I prefer not to talk about the quality of OpenOffice's Word filter). And this effect is cascading. For companies, one of the major obstacles in adopting Linux on a broad scale is its incompatibility with the Windows monoculture of the companies' business partners in the supply chain. It's as simple as that.
Now it would certainly be unrealistic to enforce an immediate switch-over to, say, PDF for all companies in the world. That would be a desirable long-term goal but not feasible in the short run. The B2A, C2A and A2A sector, however, should immediately start to standardize on open file formats. The latter refers to file formats whose specifications are completely and freely available. This can be anything from PDF to open XML based formats in case the "source code" is needed. The software which generates or imports these formats does not matter at all. Word with Acrobat Distiller is as acceptable as KOffice with ps2pdf. It's up to each company to use whatever software it feels like. As long as exchanged documents are based on open standards the software choice in company A has no impact on the software choice in company B. And this is how it should be, don't you think?
About the author: Johannes Lessmann was born 1977 in Germany. He received the M.Sc. in Computer Science in 2003 from the University of Paderborn. Currently he works as a Ph.D. student in the domain of collaborative hardware design. He is using Linux since 1997 and an active contributor to multiple Linux projects and newsgroups.
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