A member of the Scottish Parliament claimed on Thursday that there is growing support for open source software in the Scottish public sector, but warned that awareness in the Scottish Executive and Parliament is still limited.
Patrick Harvie, a Green MSP for Glasgow said: "Within the parliament, few people are aware of the issue, but there are an increasing number of civil servants who recognise there's an opportunity to save money for the public sector by using open source instead of licensed software."
The Scottish Executive, the devolved government for Scotland, is unlikely to introduce any policies around open source software in the near future as it tends to conform with the UK government's position, according to Harvie. Also, any moves towards open source are likely to be strongly opposed by Microsoft, which Harvie claims has been quick to react to any political activity around open source in the past.
"Clearly [Microsoft is] monitoring what's going on and anything that threatens their contract with the [Scottish] Executive or local authorities they respond to," said Harvie.
In September 2003, Harvie put some written questions to the Scottish Executive and Parliament to find out their position on open source software and how much they have spent on Microsoft software. Within a short period of time, Harvie was invited to dinner by a Microsoft representative. He declined the invite, but agreed to a meeting at his parliamentary office and was surprised at the Microsoft delegate's positive attitude towards open source.
"There was a huge difference between what he was saying and the way Microsoft behaves towards open source," said Harvie.
The speed with which Microsoft responded to his parliamentary question demonstrates how they are politically handling the threat that open source software poses to their business model, said Harvie.
"It was interesting that they are clearly monitoring parliamentary activity, even in a devolved parliament that has no control over the industry. They obviously want to chase up anybody that questions the position of Microsoft in the public sector," he said.
Microsoft has been quick to respond to other government agencies that have threatened to move to open source. Newham Council considered migrating from Microsoft to Linux on the desktop, but eventually stuck with Windows, which led to claims that Microsoft made massive concessions to avoid the council switching to open source. Similarly, when the City of Munich was considering a migration to Linux, Microsoft's chief executive Steve Ballmer interrupted a ski holiday in Switzerland to pay a personal visit to Munich's mayor to dissuade him from making the move, although on that occasion the software giant was unsuccessful.
In response to Harvie's questions in 2003, the Scottish Parliament said it has spent £449,000 on Microsoft software licences, which includes licences for desktop, server, database and email software. The Scottish Executive said it has licensing agreements with Microsoft which "provide significant levels of discount on published list prices for Microsoft software." The Executive said it had spent a total of £1.4m on Microsoft software between 2002 and 2003.
Harvie said he would "jump at the opportunity" to introduce open source software to the Executive in the future.
Harvie has also spoken about his views on open source software in an interview with Scottish open source software company Logicalware. An audio file of the interview is available on the company's blog.
Talkback
Further awareness of open formats is needed esp. for MS users. Vendor independence and platform independence are the two most prominent advantages of open formats. That means that for the same cost an enormous amount of flexibility is gained for both the government agencies producing materials and the public who will be using the materials.
Additionally, formats not tied into a specific vendor or platform are independent of the product cycle. In the most extreme cases of proprietary formats, the control over access to the data is in the hands of the vendor. That also means that the life cycle of the data encoded in that format is in the hands of the vendor.
Use of open formats would lessen the grip of any single vendor and make it possible for departments to choose which software actually meets their needs best rather than ending up being forced into a specific platform as the result of their data being held hostage by [legal problems with] closed formats or protocols, like happened in Central Scotland.
It will be hard to get MS to comply, however, with open formats. MS' current offerings are still highly proprietary and moving further in that direction. Scratch beneath the golden surface of MS XML for example and you find that it is potentially more closed than previous versions. Sure a *reference* schema is available for free, but actually implementing the schema is a whole other question.
Mr Harvie should be asking his colleagues about the scandal that is giving an unfair advantage to MS software over cheaper Open Source alternatives in schools (a devolved issue if I am correct)
Another example of 'lobbying' or just 'anti-competetive behaviour'?
For more info:
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2005/03/11/ms_specialist_schools_deal/
Olav, learn to read. There's a difference between open source and open standards/formats. An you're wrong again: MS's default file format for Office 12 is XML-based. For a researcher, you don't do a lot of research.
On open formats: No, YOU learn to read!
In contrast to you, he said it very well: on the surface, Microsoft going XML sounds like the real thing, whereas beyond that, you can discover that it's all patented to legally prevent the overly competitive competition from establishing full file format compatibility.
Plus, with Digital Restrictions Management mechanisms finding their way into Microsoft file formats, it will be even harder to continue to provide compatibility to Microsoft formats.
In short, anybody who will keep using new Microsoft file formats without having very urgent reasons for doing so is a fool. People should convert to very useful alternatives such as OpenOffice in droves.
Your comment has clearly been an attempt at astroturfing and muddying waters.
The part about Open Source and open formats is valid, though: if those governments were doing ONE SINGLE DEAD SIMPLE THING, namely requesting that commonly used file formats HAVE to be openly documented and usable, there wouldn't be any need to demand the use of Open Source software, since all software no matter whether proprietary or not would be able to read/write the same format, thus we'd have the perfect software market. Alas, politicians really don't know what they do or have been bribed properly to not "know" any more what should be done...
Since it would fully suffice for even only one single government to demand open format specifications, yet not a single government has followed through on that so far, I strongly suspect strong Microsoft involvement to prevent such a catastrophic event. Oh well, the old game: Microsoft not leading through innovation and useful software, but instead through intimidation, LIES and lawsuits. And all customers buying this crap hook, line and sinker...
Oh dear oh dear! Has no-one learnt any lessons from recent government decisions regarding IT systems. Letting politicians make IT choices based on their political leanings or lobbying by 3rd parties is folly. When even the IT professionals cannot agree on open source vs MS, what chance do dim-witted public servants have? Scotland does not need an air traffic control style fiasco (yes, I actually live here).
On the matter of schools, what advantage would there be in childern learning on non-MS machines when the world of work uses almost exclusively Microsoft Office? Let's think this through shall we.
Green politicians have an anti-big corporation axe to grind and are weilding it without any appreciation of the real issues involved. Leave the IT decisions to IT experts.
The decision to use MS in these schools is NOT being taken by IT professionals. It is being taken by school administrators who want to maximise their funding by claiming MS software as sponsorship 'in-kind'. No other supplier is allowed to count their software as sponsorship in this way. Surely you agree that this is unfair and anti-completetive?
If schools were able to choose the market leading software OR go for something else(without being penalised) and spend the sponsors funds elsewhere, I would have no problem with this at all.
Microsoft's announcement of XML support is another manifestation of its oft-seen tactic - embrace a technology and extend it with proprietary and incompatible extensions. For an in-depth discussion of the difference between MS XML and OpenDocument, see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050130002908154#valoris and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument. Does anyone really think MS will not defend one of its main profit centers by doing everything it can to make it costly and difficult for users and customers to swap out its Office suite?
btw State/Commenwealth of Massachusetts has announced mandatory use of OASIS' OpenDocument starting 2007 see http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/why-opendocument-won.html
As for open standards vs open source, of course they are not the same but they complement each other - the software implements the standard and helps propagate the standard, reinforcing its value. The standard gives a user the assurance that if the software company/OSS project goes under, all the data will not be lost, and thus adds value to the software.