Guild Companies

I love my home state. Beyond its natural splendor, it holds a special place in the social evolution of the nation. Oregon is a legislative gadfly. Oregon entertains more than its share of visionary and controversial legislation, including the first bottle bill, death with dignity, and universal medical coverage. Why should our approach to software procurement be any different? A bill has been introduced in the Oregon state legislature that would force a degree of fiscal accountability on state agencies wishing to purchase software.

Not so radical a notion, one would think, for a state so pathetically broke that it has been lambasted regularly in the cartoon strip Doonesbury.

Alas, the state's budget deficits are predicted to top $3 billion in the next two years, with no relief in sight. Nonetheless, Oregon's insolvency didn't dissuade the software industry from training its big lobbying guns on the state capital hoping to snuff out a budding threat to its software sales. "Fiscal responsibility. We can't have it!" one lobbyist was rumored to say. "Why, it's un-American."

But that's one of the delightful, if unintended, consequences of Oregon's periodic exploratory excursions into the legislative wilderness: It tends to tick off any number of powerful factions. And, as we know, any time the status quo is threatened, it upsets the people who have the status.

The idea behind the legislation is a simple one. In a time of budgetary crisis, the bill would require state agencies to consider open source alternatives to proprietary products. And while they would not be compelled to choose open source software, agencies would be required to justify proprietary purchases.

Unfair, bellowed the lobbyists. Accountability to taxpayers? Who ever heard of such a thing? Mario Correa, director of software policy for the Business Software Alliance, which acts as the sometimes nasty enforcement arm of the industry by threatening and prosecuting copyright violators, called the proposed legislation discriminatory. That's probably because software policy as defined by the alliance can be summed up in six words: Buy it from us, or else.

The Oregon bill is the brainchild of Eugene resident Ken Barber, a network administrator who had the temerity to exercise an ailing artifact of American democracy: representative government. He actually called his local state representative, Phil Barnhart, and convinced him to champion the idea.

Barnhart was the right man to call for a number of reasons. First, he was a Slashdot fan and was therefore knowledgeable about the open source issue. Also, as a legislator he knew that state agencies operate on a variety of expensive, proprietary software systems, none of which could directly communicate with one another. Finally, Barnhart had been a member of a school board that had been threatened by Microsoft.

The software giant, probably through the auspices of the alliance, demanded that the school district perform an audit to account for each and every copy of Microsoft software. Either proof of purchase or compensation for pirated copies was sought. The school district, however, barely had enough money to operate, much less to perform an expensive audit, and the negative publicity finally forced Microsoft to reconsider its demands. But aggressive actions often have unintended consequences. In this case, several programmers from the community approached Barnhart and offered to replace all Microsoft products with Linux and other open source software. Coincidentally, low-cost open source software had already been embraced by several other school districts likewise threatened with audits.

The case for at least considering open source was nicely summarized by Paul Nelson, a technology coordinator for a Portland school. As reported in The Oregonian, Nelson testified before the House General Government Committee. "If I can do something for free, it's unethical to spend money to do it," Nelson said. On first blush, it would be hard to argue that this is not a reasonable position for a public employee to take.

But the lobbyists strongly disagreed, and not just because they were confused by the concept of ethics, since the words "ethical" and "lobbyist" are seldom used in the same sentence. Their point was that the law currently allows agencies to consider all options, including open source. The proposed legislation would, in their words, "skew procurement decisions in a highly discriminatory fashion."

The software industry believes, and rightfully so, that forcing state agencies to justify purchases would offset some of the overwhelming advantages that an installed base and marketing provide major players like Microsoft. If state agencies were required to actually think about their choices and explore alternatives, rather than ordering no-brainer upgrades, commercial software purchases would decline. But why would it not be in the state's interest to promote frugality?

The lobbyists sidestepped the issue of thrift because it is clearly not their strong suit. Apparently ignoring its own checkered and belligerent business practices, Microsoft was now arguing for fairness. Reportedly, its lobbyists were privately meeting with key committee members, complaining that the Open Source for Oregon Bill, as it is known, was not so much pro-taxpayer as it was anti-Microsoft. That's sort of like Donald Rumsfeld complaining that the Iraqis weren't fighting fair: no doubt true, but absurd given the circumstances.

A more honest line of reasoning can be found in the quarterly reports that Microsoft is obliged to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. David Legard of IDG News Service reports that for two consecutive quarters the following statement appeared in the filing: "The popularization of the open source movement continues to pose a significant challenge to the company's business model." In particular, Microsoft complained about "efforts by proponents of the open source model to convince governments worldwide to mandate the use of open source software in their purchase and deployment of software products."

So it's starting to hurt. A handful of federal agencies and several states are already moving toward open source. California is even considering a bill that mandates the use of noncommercial software. According to the Open Source Initiative, a nonprofit that promotes the use of open source software and is headed up by Linux luminary Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, the open source manifesto, there are likely close to 27 million Linux users, and about half of all Internet servers in the United States use the open-source operating system. In Europe, it's the most popular Internet engine. To put that in perspective, there are about 20 million iSeries users and 25 million zSeries users in the world.

Which explains the whining to the government. Whining is always a good strategy for the big guys. Like the bully who gets his nose bloodied and runs complaining to the principal, Microsoft and the rest of the commercial software industry are positioning themselves to eventually request government protection. The free market, as we know, must remain inviolate, unless, of course, the steel industry needs tariffs, the airline industry needs bailouts, or big agriculture needs subsidies. Given the current environment in which shrill indictment and overstatement trump reasoned discourse, my guess is it won't be long before we start hearing accusations of economic terrorism as an excuse to stifle the spread of noncommercial software, at least within state and federal agencies.

While it would be impossible to stop the spread of open source software in the private sector, it's quite possible, given sufficient political clout, to imagine that state and federal agencies could be required to purchase commercial software "in the national economic interest." It would simply be another type of subsidy, another form of patriotism.

If economic interests are an insufficient motivator, security interests can be neatly substituted. A number of software providers are writing software for the government, helping it to spy on us in the name of national security. That cooperation could be extended easily to commercial software. Since the open source community would be unlikely to cooperate in such an undertaking, it could be denigrated as a threat to national security. And if you think it can't happen, you haven't been paying attention.

It was economist Milton Friedman who first coined the observation that there is no such thing as a free lunch. And, indeed, much of the economy depends on that being true. But it is a distasteful expression of economic self-interest that, given a lunch vastly reduced in price, those with the greatest resources will do everything in their power to prevent those with limited resources from being fed.