Presidential commission will recommend backing open source path
from the maybe-they-do-get-it dept.
A major article in the New York Times ("Code Name: Mainstream – Can 'Open Source' Bridge the Software Gap?" by Steve Lohr, 28 August 2000) reports that a Presidential commission will recommend backing the Open Source software development model as an alternative path for addressing pressing national needs in the development of new information technologies.
According to the Times article, "the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee will recommend that the federal government back 'open source software as an alternate path for software development,' according to a draft copy of the report, which will be sent to the White House and published in a matter of weeks."
A few highlights fron the Times article:
In a report to President Clinton last year, a group of leading computer scientists warned that the nation faced a troubling "software gap."
The group, made up of corporate executives and university researchers, said that programmers simply could not keep pace with exploding demand for high-quality software — the computer code needed for everything from Internet commerce to nuclear weapons design. To bridge the gap, the group said, the nation must not only train more skilled programmers but also explore fresh, even radical, approaches to developing and maintaining software.
In a new report, the group, known as the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, will recommend that the federal government back "open source software as an alternate path for software development," according to a draft copy of the report, which will be sent to the White House and published in a matter of weeks.
"I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the Internet and open-source initiatives are the free marketplace way of dealing with the extremely complex software issues we are facing," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an I.B.M. executive and a member of the presidential advisory committee.
August 28th, 2000 at 5:02 AM
The sooner the better
Good article. I hope the government follows through.
One minor correction. The discussion of licensing is clear, but omits the case of licenses such as BSD, X11, MIT, and Python which are open source (by the Open Source Definition at http://www.opensource.org) but don't require disclosing modifications. Those licenses basically let you do whatever you want with the code as long as you give credit to the originator.
Next, perhaps such a commision could work on the patent system.
August 29th, 2000 at 5:16 PM
Standards!
The best thing the government could do for open source is to encourage reduction of the number of incompatible systems and adoption of a limited number of well-defined standards – yes, at the expense of getting the latest ill-thought-out incremental innovation on the market ahead of the competition.
Of course, it is going to be unacceptable for the government to impose standards by force, or for bureacrats to pick winners and losers. But, just as Linus Torvalds was able to create a powerful standard by force of having been there first, the government could catalyze the creation of industrywide standards by announcing that official standards (NIST?) WILL be posted, and assembling technical panels from industry, academia and professionals which would hammer them out.
There would be a powerful incentive for small- to medium-size companies to comply with such standards. Perhaps it would also be wise to bow, on occasion, to the standards-setting power of monopolists, but engaging them in the definition of open standards would be preferable to the present system in which secrecy is maintained and incompatibility deliberately introduced by the biggest players in order to frustrate competition.
Updates should be issued at regular intervals, not so infrequent as to encourage wildcatting nor so frequent as to result in the same cacophony and headaches that confront computer users today. I'd like to see new versions of major standards coming out every two years, but if that would be too infrequent, perhaps x.1 versions could be released on off-years.
I'm a utopian, I know.