Open Source Well-Positioned for Open Government?
The Obama campaign was founded on hope and change. Our fearless leader promised a new level of openness, not only for major issues like healthcare and corporate financial reporting, but also in the daily operations of the government. Now that he’s been in office 5 months, it’s becoming very clear that such leaps toward transparency will demand a new level of open data, technologically advanced systems, and all at a reduced price.
"Government organizations at every level are looking to the IT community to provide value, interoperability and choice as they strain to meet the tracking, reporting and engagement demands necessary to serve citizens," said Curt Kolcun, vice president of U.S. Public Sector at Microsoft. Unlucky for Microsoft though, it's not the only organization that is on to this. Open source/open data platforms and communities like Drupal, Joomla!, and WordPress have been aiming to do just that for both the commercial and public sectors for years now. The overarching goal for platforms like Drupal has always been to advance technology to better serve society while simultaneously reducing the cost of development and deployment by sharing the costs across community contributors and established support networks. These goals translate into direct results for recent Open Government projects by providing for:
- resource-constrained government agencies to meet new Transparency & Open Government Directives sooner
- citizens to more fully participate in government initiatives and track actions
- government agencies to better collaborate and share ideas
- individuals and organizations to gather information and provide feedback effectively via the web
While it won’t be easy, it is evident that the core principles that govern open source are well aligned with the US Government’s ideas for transparency. Further, Open source communities continue to overcome regulatory hurdles with new security advancements among other critical developments that are ever-improving the viability of open source technologies as a government solution.
Why is open source so important? Bottom-line: because open systems are the best way to maximize external contribution—nationally and globally. The fact that open source technologies holds the key to this effort is a given, widespread acceptance, however, remains the ultimate challenge.
Comments
Importance
"Why is open source so important? Bottom-line: because open systems are the best way to maximize external contribution—nationally and globally."
Well no. The most significant importance of open source is independence from single vendors, and the good conscience of knowing that a strong community will always prefer user rights and clean code over quick profit.
Maximization of external contributions is a result of developer enthusiasm over the above plus the GPL forcing the code to be published, and may be the reason for companies to buy into certain open source solutions, but that's not the main differentiator from proprietary solutions - in fact, if you look at extensions to MS Office, Facebook or the iPhone, you'll quickly notice that software being open source is not in direct relation with external contributions.
You've missed something essential if *that* is your answer for "why is open source so important?". The real considerations regarding open source are a question of control, and a question of who you can trust. Everything else just results from those principles, and are neither the reason why open source exists nor the reason why a government would want to use it.
It really depends
I agree with you that, in general, there're multiple benefits that can be leveraged by using an open-source solution. No "Vendor Lock-In" is indeed an important and well-known one. However, it is not necessarily the "most significant" one. At least - not always.
I will give you an example. If a company or an organization is considering adoption of Drupal the level and impact of external contributions is extremely high. Drupal is pretty much entirely built based on external contributions and is, arguably, the most feature-rich CMS to date. There are other significant open-source solutions where "crowd"-driven contributions are much less frequent and transparency + availability (no single vendor) are more important factors than community contribution. So it depends - in Drupal's case external contributions play #1 role, in other cases - they do not. It's not always one or the other.
Also your example of MS Office, Facebook and iPhone "extensions", while interesting is not really a fair analogy. Those "extensions" are mostly commercial plugins that you need to pay for (yes, Facebook applications are not free either, most of them are built to make money). They are not "contributions", by any stretch of imagination.
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