Don't believe "No open source down under," "No closed source on deck" - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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April 04, 2008
Don't believe "No open source down under," "No closed source on deck"

Be careful: A lot of blog post headlines just don't get the underlying story straight. Don't blame the blogger necessarily because headlines often get changed as posts are syndicated through the Web. I don't know which is worse for the open source software (OSS) community, the occasional bad headline or the frequent process by which info gets changed as it is passed from blogger to blogger like the whisper game you played as a kid. This is a bigger problem than the rantings of independent bloggers because a higher degree of accuracy is expected of professional organizations.

There's this one with the headline "Open source barred from Australian government" that says open source is out down under. Then there's this one with the headline, "US Navy's new policy: Only open software" that says the U.S. Navy has a new policy where it will use OSS only.

Neither headline is accurate.

I am going to assume the Australian story is correct and that the headline is simply wrong. The story seems pretty straightforward. It says Australian government CIOs have a problem with software that isn't commercially supported; I hear the same thing all the time from non-government CIOs. For example, at this week's Linux/OSS on Wall St. Conference, Aaron Groves of Citigroup--speaking on a Linux Comes of Age panel--said his group doesn't use software that is not commercially supported. Whether it is open source or not is not even a question they ask.

The CNet story is a great example of the tinkers-to-evers-to-chance nature of the blogosphere. The initial Federal Computer Week article was reprinted verbatim by another blog but without the context of the FCW site. The FCW headline writer had already turned the actual words in the speech, "open technology," into "open systems" and that was then picked up by CNet, where the headline was changed from "open systems" to "open software."

Then a claim was made out of whole cloth that the "Navy just announced a bold IT policy." Well in fact there is an almost two-year-old policy all about open architecture, which I interpret to mean standards--not OSS--from reading all the background material. Of course, the Navy is not against open source anymore than any Aussie CIOs are. But in fact the U.S. Navy CIO had to put out a memo in 2007 saying that it was alright to acquire OSS, not that every one in the Navy had to acquire it.

It's time for the OSS-oriented software businesses to stop claiming special privilege and acting as if supported OSS is any different than any other supported software. All software is acquired and paid for the same way it always has been in governments around the world.