Articles tagged ‘lock-in’

Digital music is the future. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the past.

National Linux distributions have special responsibilities. They should encourage a nation's open source activities as broadly as possible rather than present an isolated solution based on inevitably limited resources.

Governments should utilize Information Technology (IT) procurement policy to help achieve transparency, competition, measurement and efficiency in the purchasing process. A policy which incorporates open source as a choice for solutions complements the role of standards. Open source and open standards together can help strengthen a framework for procuring and delivering solutions to meet the needs of government.

The adoption of OSS and Open Standards can improve governance and help provide citizen services fairly and transparently. The State of Massachusetts recently adopted the OpenDocument Format (ODF) setting a landmark precedent to support open standards for all document exchange between the state and its customers — businesses, citizens and other government entities.

While the UK’s Office of Government Commerce (OGC) points to the savings possible using OSS and warns against high lifecycle costs of proprietary software, its cousin organization, the National Health Service (NHS), indulges in an expensive renewal of proprietary software licenses.

“Price-slashing” by monopolistic proprietary software companies masks the high costs customers still unwittingly pay. And when this rip-off is endorsed by governments and industry leaders, the digital divide can only widen.

Malaysia jumps to the forefront of the world’s growing official support for the Penguin by making OSS a procurement preference for government purchases.

My enemy’s enemy is not my friend! The shadow world created to exploit proprietary software hurts both the proprietary vendor and open source software.

By implementing fair ICT procurement practices informed by a government policy that promotes the larger economic welfare and social benefits, we can begin to rephrase “may the best product win” into “may the most beneficial product win”.

It’s not that freedom is so very right, it’s that slavery is so very wrong.