A new software acquisition reform bill in Texas follows another in Oregon. Both seek a fair shake for free and open source software.
It seems there's a fundamental problem for many state governments that want to acquire and use free software: They can't buy it. Literally. That's because the state software acquisition process doesn't know what to do with software that nobody owns or sells. As political consultant Tom Adelstein puts it, "Governments require bidding. Since there's no Apache, Inc., Apache doesn't get on the bid list." Nor do Linux and other forms of free and open open source noncommercial software -- no matter how useful they may be, and no matter how much money they save.
This is the situation being addressed by Texas Legislature Bill SB 1579 sponsored by Sen. John Corona, introduced on March 17. It follows Oregon House Bill 2892, sponsored by Rep. Phil Barnhart, introduced on March 5. Unlike the Digital Softare Security Act initiative in California, neither of these bills mandates use of free or open source softare. Instead they simply open those forms of software to consideration in the bidding process. In other words, they prevent exclusion of non-commercial forms of software.
Cost is an issue as well. The Texas bill addresses "determining best value for purchases," defined by "lowest overall costs". In addition to price, those include compatibility, upgradability, reliability, training, technical support, standards compliance and other factors. Basing acquisition (and not just purchase) on these considerations should reduce far more than Texas' $1.5 billion annual computing expenses.
Or, as Senator Corona puts it, "Linux could provide significant savings through better exploitation of existing hardware, the ability to consolidate servers, and substantially lower licensing costs."
These legislative moves come at a time when corporate aversion to Linux and open source is waning fast. It only makes sense for private and public software acquisition reforms to follow parallel paths.
Linux Journal is taking a special interest in these devleopments, because we know there is far more going on than commercial vendors can ever tell us. IBM, HP, Oracle and other companies are very good at feeding us all kinds of Linux success stories; but they simply are not in a position to report on highly useful and popular stuff that with costs that round to zero while benefits run in the millions or even billions. We're sure the same is true in government, where even the commercial vendors often don't have much to say.
Right now we're studying how smart companies make themselves smarter using Linux. It would be interesting to include governments in that same study. If you have any interesting accounts to report, write to me at [email protected].