The open source governmental adoption wave

I just closed out my quarter (whew!), and needed to relax a bit. So I plowed through Jyh-An Lee’s article in the Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law. [PDF] It presents a very interesting face on the rising trend of open source adoption by national and local governments worldwide, including offering some reasons for the trend:

The ultimate conclusion is that when two systems are equally suitable, governments may reasonably choose OSS over proprietary software because software industry market failures may justify such support of OSS development. While governments considering supporting OSS are primarily concerned with significant switching costs and incompatibility problems, OSS is actually superior to proprietary software because it increases compatibility and consequently decreases switching costs in the long term. Further, OSS will not only help developing countries build their information technology capabilities, but will also promote competition in the software market. (48)

As the article notes, “[a]s of September 4, 2006, at least 99 governments in 44 countries had undertaken administrative or legislative action in support of OSS development” (56). It’s interesting to note that Africa seems to be missing the trend – I’m not sure why. Certainly it would have all the same reasons for adoption that, say, Latin America would.

Some interesting tidbits from the rest of the paper:

• Promoting OSS by administrative efforts (rather than by legislative action or subsidies) appears to be the most common practice among countries that have OSS policies. (58)

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  Thirty-two pieces of legislation regarding OSS (almost half the total number) come from just three countries. (59) Brazil takes the lion’s share, with the US and Argentina coming in second and third. So, let’s keep the “tide” in perspective. This also helps to prove the author’s contention that administrative actions trump legislative action when promoting open source: the former are much more widespread than the latter, geographically speaking.
• For governments that prefer OSS to proprietary software, the most common practice to support OSS is to expand the incorporation of OSS into its software procurement decisions. Specifically, governments in many countries have partially migrated from Microsoft Windows systems to Linux systems via new software procurement. For example, since 1999, the French government largely has moved to OSS. Additionally, governments in China, Germany, and many other countries are adopting OSS in their government agencies. (62)

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  Intriguingly, though the path of least resistance to promotion of open source would be to simply require “consideration” of open source, most legislation actually calls for open source to get preferential treatment. (65) While I used to think “preference” was wrong for governments – either for open source or closed – my trip to Venezuela last year changed that for me. It’s not about money. It’s about freedom. Governments should promote software that promotes the freedom of their citizenries.
• Even so, as the author notes, as of September 4, 2006, most of the proposed OSS “preference” type legislation either had failed or was still pending. In fact, only 14 out of 59 pieces of OSS preference legislation successfully passed. Moreover, it was local legislatures that passed these successful bills. Thus, no effective national OSS legislation had passed as of September 4, 2006. (66) This is almost certainly in large part due to the difficulties involved in achieving majority votes for anything that makes a government a biased party in technology decisions. I’m sure Microsoft (and other proprietary vendors) had its hands in this, as is consistent with its shareholder interest.

There is a lot more to cover in the paper – the author goes through a range of reasons governments are looking at open source, highlights technological and political concerns involved in the switch, and also addresses other aspects of government adoption of open source. Interesting read, and worth your time.