If you follow my IT investment research blog (see the IT Investment Research button to the right and look for a March 17 post on Open Standards in Massachusetts), you see why it is important to compare what the blogosphere says to what the official record says. That's the case for any subject... or as your father probably told you: "Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers." Ever since the open source software (OSS) blogosphere erupted about 10 days ago over the "new EU strategy document on open source," I have been trying to get the document itself to match its commentary to the official record.
Turns out I can't. I can't get the strategy document, at least officially, and presumably none of the others blogging on the subject can either. Dale Kidd of the Spokesperson's Service of the European Commission (EC) in Brussels says by email:
"The full strategy document with associated work plan has not been published, since it's for internal use only. However, the synopsis of the Commission's OSS strategy provided on the Europa site is quite clear and comprehensive."
The "synopsis" I was pointed to by Dale is revealing. It's really less about adopting open source in the EC and more about coordinating the adoption of open source between possibly competing EC agencies. The movement to EC adoption of OSS is eight-year-old old news. But it is new news, according to the synopsis, that the Directorate-General for Informatics (DIGIT) "has taken over the responsibility for the IDABC programme." IDABC stands for Interoperable Delivery of European eGovernment Services to public Administrations, Businesses and Citizens.
(As I said last week, I can't figure out the euracracy. Europeans probably cannot figure out the U.S.'s multi-layered, bi-cameral, separation of powers governments either. As explained over on my investment-research website, the misunderstanding of the Massachusetts state government is what lead to so many people who follow OSS thinking of Massachuetts as an early-adopter haven of Microbashers. Actually the opposite is true: when a Microbasher civil servant threatened to take their powerpoints away from them a few years ago, Massachusetts government employees screamed like hell. It helped that the Microbasher bureacrat was also tyring to put into place a policy that cut off the legally blind, hearing impaired and others that depend on Word add-ins for the disabled. The civil servant obviously wasn't a politiican. He was also quickly retunred to the "dreaded private sector," as we like to call it here in Massachusetts.)
Anyways, the key items of this EU new policy are said to be
(1).) use OSS where a clear benefit can be expected;
(2.) consider OSS solutions the same way as proprietary ones in IT procurements (on a "value for money" basis--consider not only licence costs ,but also setup, maintenance, support and training costs);
(3.) promote the use of products that support open, well-documented standards (interoperability is a critical issue for the Commission) and
(4.) and for all new development, where deployment and usage is foreseen by parties outside of the Commission infrastructure, Open Source Software will be the preferred development and deployment platform. (The phrase in bold appears to apply to other government entities in Europe that might use EU developed software. And this ties into the recent EU request to have its own Open Source Initiative OSS license.)
II is unclear to me how that differs from the old policy, also described in the synopsis, which was to "formally allow and encourage" the use of Open Source Software where "a clear benefit can be expected". And I wonder how this correlates with the EC's recent contract with Sun where UNIX was specced in. Can new software be deployed to the new Sun servers?
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