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Story: Researcher slams open-source compulsion

Posted by: adebayo omo-dare (Monday 15 September 2003, 12:28 PM)

As an MD, mr Mc Cabe should know that the goal of any order/organisation, is to deepen the control, enhance the flexibility, encourage the interraction, as well as lower the costs of all aspects relating to the order's/organisation's operating environment.

The above, as fundamentals, are simple requirements governing survival/prosperity and that is why government orders will give preferential control to "Open" Source.

In recognition of the community based philosophy that forms the foundation and therefore is the motivation behind open source activity, governments understand that the pool of talent in the "open market" shall remain the same, at least in the short term, and that all that changes, is the ability to efficiently interrelate demand/"demand type" with supply/"supply type" in a manner that increases the efficiency of the overall system and not just parts of the system.

Efficiency, in itself, requires better relationships between factors of consumption and production -the latter manifest in the overall productivity of the environment.

For governments, directly spending 30 miillion per annum on acquiring well "defined" productivity software, as end products in themselves, with complex, diverse and limitiing exceptions tied to individual contracts, offers less advantages than employing 600 individual programmers who interrelate with multiples of the above number under libre licences and with freedom to continually "tie" deployed products to operating environments thereby directly enhancing productivity.

Enhancements made and delivered freely to consumers of all types/"society", governments are well aware, can enhace the productivity of participants in their economic spheres. This is said with an understanding that government activity, of the above type, yield derived benefits related to the indirect conversion of expenditure in to social profit - Though the latter may not directly yield an increase in the quantity of capital expenditure/capital receipts, it can definately yield an increase in the quality of such expenditure/receipts -i.e, efficiency, the latter manifest in better control of the overall system.

One would have thought that the simple nature of the above should have been clear to any person in Mr Mc Cabe's position. I guess this is why we all should be careful about what exactly it is we do in fact choose to presume...