> González Waite said that all of the large proprietary software companies ""are big bullies"". He has been called into the US embassy and been threatened because Mexico was using technology that was not from the US; those threats were dialed back when he explained that the government also used software and services from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software. Every time a successful switch happened, ""six months later there was an audit""; having the right legal team helps defend against those tactics, he said.
It matches also what I heard from someone working for the Dutch government. He said that whenever they needed a new software system, that Microsoft would send multiple consultants for "free" which all could "help" the transition to a new service from Microsoft.
There was an interesting story with the LiMux[1] ( Linux & Munich) project. The local government in Munich used it for quite some time. But than Microsoft came and installed there German Headquarters in Munich. With that new headquarter and enough lobbying, LiMux was forced out by the then new government just the moment it got "successful".
LiMux always gets mentioned in such topics... it's an interesting story and as I've actually worked there early in my career I've written a few times about what the actual issues were and why it failed - you might read through [1].
tl;dr: LiMux didn't just fail due to politics (although politics did play a large role and I will forever dislike Dieter Reiter for a multitude of reasons, LiMux being among them), it was set up for failure from the beginning, mostly budget related.
I worked for a very old school manufacturing company based in Switzerland.
We wanted to roll our own IoT platform for sensors in the factory.
We spoke to MS, what they had was a load of garbage, so we decided to carry on as we were.
I later found out that the MS CEO called the CEO of this company and from then on we were fighting every day as to why we weren’t using MS. This was a private company, not even a big spend, yet they got the CEO involved on sales calls? That’s when I realised how corrupt it was an org.
CERN (also in CH) made a half-effort to switch away from MS a few years ago. MS had started charging them a crazy amount of money. They got a few people working on it and even switched a few of the back end services. And actually the open source stuff worked amazingly well!
Then like a year later they doubled down on MS products (right after a new IT head came in). The IT people I spoke to had no idea why this happened but no one seemed to think going back to MS was a good idea.
Small companies matter because the transition to non proprietary tech is potentially simpler and thus more likely to succeed. Add a few success stories from small players in the same market, making them more competitive might raise the attention of bigger players.
I can recommend watching the free documentary "The Microsoft Dilemma - Europe as a software colony" which highlights and explains how they target corrupt branches of the government, with under the table deals for specific threats and doxxes against politicians, up until "shilling" as government officials when they are not even working there, creating fake email addresses on their tenant's email domains to make it look like they have an administrative say in decisions in other teams of the projects.
Meanwhile, all major OEMs, and OS vendors routinely use BSDs and Linux distributions in some form, yet it is the same business as usual as 30 years ago, reverse engineering hardware support.
The only "Linux Desktop" ready desktops and laptops to find at local shopping mall for normies are Android and ChromeOS devices, likewise in out-of-the-box experience for hardware support for peripherals.
The government could order Linux ready hardware in bulk. Also, 30 years ago, normies were able to handle DOS, which is perfectly sufficient for bureaucratic applications. They'd be able to do so after two weeks of training even nowadays.
Most of these companies are absolutely total bullies. They’ll go to your board, CEO, governor, senator, mayor, audit firm, wherever. Punish your friends and elevate your enemies.
A big part of being a CIO or CTO is having and maintaining relationships with key suppliers. This is especially true with SaaS/IaaS, where your business is valued based on whatever bullshit churn metrics the company cooked up. Your $2M deal may have way bigger impact on a Sales VP bonus than you think. You have to be a different kind of asshole to maintain control of these guys than in the old software world.
"Economists who have studied the software industry concluded that the value of a software business is about equal to the total costs of its customers switching out to the competition; both are equal to the net present value of future payments from the customers to the software vendor. This means that an incumbent in a maturing market, such as Microsoft with its Office product, can grow faster than the market only if it can find ways to lock in its customers more tightly. There are some ifs and buts that hedge this theory around, but the basic idea is well known to software industry executives. This explains Bill G's comment that `We came at this thinking about music, but then we realized that e-mail and documents were far more interesting domains'."
The article uses the phrase "no brainer" but then explains why it very much requires brainer when making IT decisions.
License costs are a factor, yes, but they are not the only cost, and in most cases not the significant one.
In some cases the offerings are similar enough that it moves the needle. PostgreSQL for example is a good candidate- Oracle is expensive, and the number of people interacting with it is limited. Plus the fundamentals of Oracle and PostgreSQL are more-or-less the same.
On the other extreme the cost of training and support dwarfs the license cost. If all staff come with knowing how to use say Windows and Excel,but require training and support for say Linux Desktop and Libre Office, then the "free" thing costs more.
It's no accident that OSS has done better on the backend than the front end.
Success for OSS means putting the right product in the right place, taking all things (not just license cost) into account.
(Aside: corruption is a red herring, corrupt officials and companies can be corrupt regardless of software license.)
Training is another cash cow from big tech, on many levels. It is a bonus for resellers and partners, binding the ecosystem together. And the maze of certifications that expire every other year or so makes big tech corps even more money, and has everybody invested. It is also a useful sales tool, because they don't cost much and can be thrown in as a discount. You can also achieve a kind of vendor lock in on the career skills more easily with certifications. Legions of Microsoft technicians are pretty much stuck in the ecosystem, because if they switch their certs and experience don't mean anything anymore. Not everybody has the technical chops to switch ecosystem every year. Even more pressure to not move to open source (or another vendor).
If you think Microsoft makes it sales because its buyers are putting the right product in the right place, then you haven't seen a lot of Microsoft sales. This is absolutely not how it works. And it doesn't have a lot to do with corruption either.
The people making the decision to buy an IT product are often not its users, and often not that much concerned with making the best short/mid/long term deal in the interest of the business. They are very much concerned in making the best deal for their own careers, and as these are the people who buy the thing some companies have competently specialized in optimizing sales given that fact. Oracle has a reputation for this, and Microsoft as well, but all big tech does it (just some do it better than others). Of course, there's some nuance, you can't get away with it if your product doesn't work.
For a lot of software in megacorps, it makes more sense if you look at 'trained in X' as a kind of magic spell that has no real relation with the ability to do a job.
If the end user says: I have no training in X, that mostly means they don't want to work with X or don't want to accept extra workload related to X. The company then provides training in X, another magic spell meaning money was spent so the company officially did something, and the excuse about not being trained won't work anymore. Blame has now been shifted from the company to the worker or even the end user. So training being expensive has better optics.
Big tools like MSOffice have the ability to be put in hiring contracts: Everyone is assumed to know how to use it, so the company is allowed to deny the no training excuse without spending money.
Actual training for the whole company is more like a networking event, and if you ignore the trainer and read the manual or watch some youtube, you may actually learn what you're supposed to. Once in a while, you get a trainer who knows what they are talking about. But all that is secondary.
It is much more economical to invest in local open source people to take care of the tech need than big corp. Big corp are notorious unreliable over long period of time, their incentives are NOT aligned with the customers, only with profit and/or 3 letter agencies.
"Third, there are often large costs to users from
switching technologies, which leads to lock-in.
Such markets may remain very profitable, even
where (incompatible) competitors are very cheap
to produce. In fact, one of the main results of
network economic theory is that the net present
value of the customer base should equal the total
costs of their switching their business to a com-
petitor [19]."
"corruption is a red herring, corrupt officials and companies can be corrupt regardless of software license."
Corruption implies that somebody is making enough money to pay bribes. Therefore, corruption will naturally be to the advantage of those that make the most money from the least quality offering.
Not really. The company's not really paying bribes out of their own money though. They're paying it out of the revenue flow from that sale.
In other words "give me this govt contract and I'll route n% of it back to you".
n% has to be "reasonable" or there's no commercial point in offering the bribe to begin with.
If there's a cash-flow issue (you gotta pay the bribe before getting the contract) then I guess it favors deep pockets.
In a developing country, you really want to be careful with your dollars/imports. Local labor is almost certainly cheaper and more abundant. The question is, can they do it all. If they can you save dollars and you build local skills that transfer, a double benefit. If they can't, yes you might be forced to buy and import the tech.
And liability, as mentioned in the OP, is a big issue. When you find a bug in Oracle that kills your DBMS, you open a ticket and Oracle has to provide a fix (or at least a workaround) based on the SLA.
Postgres developers, as the license says, have NO OBLIGATIONS TO
PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS. This means you have to do one of three options:
- hire Postgres experts into every ministry. Not very efficient.
- create a single government agency that provides support to the rest of the government. Might easily lose efficiency, as any other bureaucracy
- create a commercial support provider that has to earn money by selling Postgres support to private enterprises. Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the highest possible price for its services.
I actually managed to get Oracle to fix a bug once. This in quite a big organization, with a huge amount of money going to oracle. I could explain them exactly what was wrong, how to fix it, and still they denied the very existence of the bug (and cited the expensive half-working workaround other companies used at the same time). Then they ignored what I told them and fixed it in a way that did not fix it. Then they fixed it, and did not allow us to use the fix until it was officialized in a real service pack.
The whole process took multiple months, reading all contracts I couldget my hands on, answering the phone at 3AM, a lot of patience, and treating Oracle as a student who was 2 weeks late with their homework. After that, all oraclies at the organization were completely awed because I was the first person ever who managed to get a usefull new patch out of oracle's service.
If you want results, get Postgres. If you want someone to blame, get Oracle.
It is not bureaucracy vs magical efficiency. There is the same issue in any large organisation, even corporations. In practice I don’t think it would be as bad as you suggest. Having an agency focused on providing support instead of sending money to shareholders also limits other kinds of inefficiencies.
> Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the highest possible price for its services.
That is exactly the situation we’re in, where governments are tied and dependent on single providers (be it Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, or others). This solution would create competition opportunities by opening a market, it does not need to be a monopoly.
> Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the highest possible price for its services.
So you switch to a different commercial service provider, problem solved. The software is open source, they can't lock you down in a predatory contract. Worst-case scenario, you can always choose to fork it yourself.
“ create a single government agency that provides support to the rest of the government. Might easily lose efficiency, as any other bureaucracy”. As opposed to huge corporations that are known to be the pinnacle of efficiency…
You missed one: hire one of the many existing providers of Postgres support services. Postgres have a big list of these providers. [0]
I can't comment on how well they perform in practice compared to the conventional monopolised support model that closed-source software tends to offer - perhaps better, perhaps worse - but at least in principle, the solution is there.
> Another part of the project was to move away from Oracle and to PostgreSQL. That change led to various threats and intimidation from the company when it learned of the change, González Waite said. "They told me that the entire passport system of the country was going to fall down" and that it would be his fault that Mexico could not let anyone into or out of the country. "Guess what? That didn't happen."
Larry Ellison, never change. It'll be interesting to see how they ruin TikTok if their bid succeeds.
I think at this moment all governments should start funding the open source foundations so that the foundations can train as well as retain good programming talent to keep the important open source software maintained. I think it will serve better in the long term to the government departments as well as the citizens.
If this is how we do it, there is the glaring vulnerability that a rogue administration could yank the rug on all these organizations and leave them scrambling for funding.
This was a pleasant and encouraging article to read.
I do think that open source is slowly growing in traditional enterprises, although I think recent interest in cloud computing and artificial intelligence has pushed a lot of software contracting out of the company. Open source migrations might become harder in the future when the enterprise no longer controls their own databases and models.
My slogan for using FOSS for govt is "citizen owned software".
At one time, I anticipated the rise of FOSS consortiums. Jurisdictions with similar needs would join together to share the cost and risks.
Canada, Mexico, USA each have 1,000s of juridictions. Surely at any one time there's a handful planning a technology refresh of some domain.
One easy example I know of is property tax administration. There's a bunch of counties of similar size all doing the same thing, but all running off in separate directions. Vendor options are complicated, expensive, and have lock-in. Surely it'd be beneficial to pool their resources and own their stack?
Another is election administration. US counties used to do all it themselves. Candidate filings, voter registration, poll books, yadda, yadda. Now it's all outsourced. Lower service for higher prices. (The "certification" process was captured, serving to protect incumbents. Natch.)
Any way.
I was a grunt for a member of a consortium FOSS project. It was awful. "The Logic of Collective Action" explained a great deal of the pathology. Also, Byran Cantrill's quote (wrt Open Solaris) about "having the freedom but not the power to fork" was spot on for our project.
Any way.
Does any one have examples or game plan or vision for realizing more FOSS in govt? I'm not quite ready to give up on the dream.
> It turned out that various contracted companies had corruptly put the software licenses they bought for the government into their own names, leading to a lock-in for their services.
This is a dirty trick I ran into in [US] state procurement, in a state known for widespread corruption. It's basically a no-show job where you just hold a bunch of long-term contracts for the state, and claim a monthly "support" fee for doing it. Even worse, you got to negotiate those contracts (and set up your kickbacks or self-dealing.) Bonus points for needing to call the contractor in order to have the contractor call support, and the contractor taking a fee for doing it.
Endless avenues for corruption with a setup like this.
Readit News
> González Waite said that all of the large proprietary software companies ""are big bullies"". He has been called into the US embassy and been threatened because Mexico was using technology that was not from the US; those threats were dialed back when he explained that the government also used software and services from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software. Every time a successful switch happened, ""six months later there was an audit""; having the right legal team helps defend against those tactics, he said.
It matches also what I heard from someone working for the Dutch government. He said that whenever they needed a new software system, that Microsoft would send multiple consultants for "free" which all could "help" the transition to a new service from Microsoft.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
tl;dr: LiMux didn't just fail due to politics (although politics did play a large role and I will forever dislike Dieter Reiter for a multitude of reasons, LiMux being among them), it was set up for failure from the beginning, mostly budget related.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Then like a year later they doubled down on MS products (right after a new IT head came in). The IT people I spoke to had no idea why this happened but no one seemed to think going back to MS was a good idea.
Discussed more here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41717607
They are out to lock you in to ensure sustained cashflow, not solve your problem in the most impartial and cost efficient way for you.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=duaYLW7LQvg
Yt-dlp while it's hot. Microsoft sure sends DMCA takedowns after this one.
The only "Linux Desktop" ready desktops and laptops to find at local shopping mall for normies are Android and ChromeOS devices, likewise in out-of-the-box experience for hardware support for peripherals.
Dead Comment
A big part of being a CIO or CTO is having and maintaining relationships with key suppliers. This is especially true with SaaS/IaaS, where your business is valued based on whatever bullshit churn metrics the company cooked up. Your $2M deal may have way bigger impact on a Sales VP bonus than you think. You have to be a different kind of asshole to maintain control of these guys than in the old software world.
"Economists who have studied the software industry concluded that the value of a software business is about equal to the total costs of its customers switching out to the competition; both are equal to the net present value of future payments from the customers to the software vendor. This means that an incumbent in a maturing market, such as Microsoft with its Office product, can grow faster than the market only if it can find ways to lock in its customers more tightly. There are some ifs and buts that hedge this theory around, but the basic idea is well known to software industry executives. This explains Bill G's comment that `We came at this thinking about music, but then we realized that e-mail and documents were far more interesting domains'."
Also it strikes me that as a developer my investment of learning is more in code d So it’s easier to switch
Quote from here and the idea is from this https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200167344_Informati...
Deleted Comment
License costs are a factor, yes, but they are not the only cost, and in most cases not the significant one.
In some cases the offerings are similar enough that it moves the needle. PostgreSQL for example is a good candidate- Oracle is expensive, and the number of people interacting with it is limited. Plus the fundamentals of Oracle and PostgreSQL are more-or-less the same.
On the other extreme the cost of training and support dwarfs the license cost. If all staff come with knowing how to use say Windows and Excel,but require training and support for say Linux Desktop and Libre Office, then the "free" thing costs more.
It's no accident that OSS has done better on the backend than the front end.
Success for OSS means putting the right product in the right place, taking all things (not just license cost) into account.
(Aside: corruption is a red herring, corrupt officials and companies can be corrupt regardless of software license.)
If you think Microsoft makes it sales because its buyers are putting the right product in the right place, then you haven't seen a lot of Microsoft sales. This is absolutely not how it works. And it doesn't have a lot to do with corruption either.
The people making the decision to buy an IT product are often not its users, and often not that much concerned with making the best short/mid/long term deal in the interest of the business. They are very much concerned in making the best deal for their own careers, and as these are the people who buy the thing some companies have competently specialized in optimizing sales given that fact. Oracle has a reputation for this, and Microsoft as well, but all big tech does it (just some do it better than others). Of course, there's some nuance, you can't get away with it if your product doesn't work.
If the end user says: I have no training in X, that mostly means they don't want to work with X or don't want to accept extra workload related to X. The company then provides training in X, another magic spell meaning money was spent so the company officially did something, and the excuse about not being trained won't work anymore. Blame has now been shifted from the company to the worker or even the end user. So training being expensive has better optics.
Big tools like MSOffice have the ability to be put in hiring contracts: Everyone is assumed to know how to use it, so the company is allowed to deny the no training excuse without spending money.
Actual training for the whole company is more like a networking event, and if you ignore the trainer and read the manual or watch some youtube, you may actually learn what you're supposed to. Once in a while, you get a trainer who knows what they are talking about. But all that is secondary.
Most people don’t know much about the OS or Office, so you have to train them anyway for the companies use cases and non standard programs.
MS just seems convenient, but isn’t. In large companies every update brings problems.
Things like Teams change the UI quite often which leads to support questions.
So for me the training costs don’t differ that much.
And why? Because the designers need to prove that they so something?
Corruption implies that somebody is making enough money to pay bribes. Therefore, corruption will naturally be to the advantage of those that make the most money from the least quality offering.
In other words "give me this govt contract and I'll route n% of it back to you". n% has to be "reasonable" or there's no commercial point in offering the bribe to begin with.
If there's a cash-flow issue (you gotta pay the bribe before getting the contract) then I guess it favors deep pockets.
In a developing country, you really want to be careful with your dollars/imports. Local labor is almost certainly cheaper and more abundant. The question is, can they do it all. If they can you save dollars and you build local skills that transfer, a double benefit. If they can't, yes you might be forced to buy and import the tech.
The structure of the phrase is [[no brain]er], not [no [brainer]].
See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-er , sense 7/8.
> While open source seems like a "no-brainer", it turns out that governments can be surprisingly resistant to using FOSS for a variety of reasons.
Postgres developers, as the license says, have NO OBLIGATIONS TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS. This means you have to do one of three options:
The whole process took multiple months, reading all contracts I couldget my hands on, answering the phone at 3AM, a lot of patience, and treating Oracle as a student who was 2 weeks late with their homework. After that, all oraclies at the organization were completely awed because I was the first person ever who managed to get a usefull new patch out of oracle's service.
If you want results, get Postgres. If you want someone to blame, get Oracle.
Have you received reasonable help in reasonable time that way? How big was the investment on your company's side to make that happen?
It was a meme on every DBA team I worked with.
It is not bureaucracy vs magical efficiency. There is the same issue in any large organisation, even corporations. In practice I don’t think it would be as bad as you suggest. Having an agency focused on providing support instead of sending money to shareholders also limits other kinds of inefficiencies.
> Again, there's a risk that it will start charging the highest possible price for its services.
That is exactly the situation we’re in, where governments are tied and dependent on single providers (be it Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, or others). This solution would create competition opportunities by opening a market, it does not need to be a monopoly.
So you switch to a different commercial service provider, problem solved. The software is open source, they can't lock you down in a predatory contract. Worst-case scenario, you can always choose to fork it yourself.
Deleted Comment
I can't comment on how well they perform in practice compared to the conventional monopolised support model that closed-source software tends to offer - perhaps better, perhaps worse - but at least in principle, the solution is there.
[0] https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/
Larry Ellison, never change. It'll be interesting to see how they ruin TikTok if their bid succeeds.
Deleted Comment
I do think that open source is slowly growing in traditional enterprises, although I think recent interest in cloud computing and artificial intelligence has pushed a lot of software contracting out of the company. Open source migrations might become harder in the future when the enterprise no longer controls their own databases and models.
At one time, I anticipated the rise of FOSS consortiums. Jurisdictions with similar needs would join together to share the cost and risks.
Canada, Mexico, USA each have 1,000s of juridictions. Surely at any one time there's a handful planning a technology refresh of some domain.
One easy example I know of is property tax administration. There's a bunch of counties of similar size all doing the same thing, but all running off in separate directions. Vendor options are complicated, expensive, and have lock-in. Surely it'd be beneficial to pool their resources and own their stack?
Another is election administration. US counties used to do all it themselves. Candidate filings, voter registration, poll books, yadda, yadda. Now it's all outsourced. Lower service for higher prices. (The "certification" process was captured, serving to protect incumbents. Natch.)
Any way.
I was a grunt for a member of a consortium FOSS project. It was awful. "The Logic of Collective Action" explained a great deal of the pathology. Also, Byran Cantrill's quote (wrt Open Solaris) about "having the freedom but not the power to fork" was spot on for our project.
Any way.
Does any one have examples or game plan or vision for realizing more FOSS in govt? I'm not quite ready to give up on the dream.
This is a dirty trick I ran into in [US] state procurement, in a state known for widespread corruption. It's basically a no-show job where you just hold a bunch of long-term contracts for the state, and claim a monthly "support" fee for doing it. Even worse, you got to negotiate those contracts (and set up your kickbacks or self-dealing.) Bonus points for needing to call the contractor in order to have the contractor call support, and the contractor taking a fee for doing it.
Endless avenues for corruption with a setup like this.