cfarrell's blog

I recently read an article by Ted Dziuba in which he comments on an open letter written by the heads of well-known open source software companies to President Obama, in which they argue that the license of government procured software should be considered, when deciding on who gets the contract. Ted suggested that President Obama has many items on his agenda which have a far higher priority than the license of government procured software and that thus, the open letter was a “waste... of the president's time”. While Ted's assertion about the ranking of the licensing issue certainly cannot be considered immaterial, he completely misses the point, not just of the open letter, but also of the nature of Free and Open Source Software, and of the change governance that President Obama encourages.

Many CIOs will be taking a close look at their budgets at the moment, to see where savings can be made, in light of the downturn in the global economy. Inevitably, they will stumble across GNU/Linux, if they have not done so already. One of the most attractive aspects of basing the IT needs of an enterprise on GNU/Linux is that the relevant software licenses do not require that licensing fees be paid. Additionally, the particularly strong support for open standards by commercial vendors of GNU/Linux as well as by the FLOSS community as a whole means that adopting a GNU/Linux environment will mean keeping business data “future safe” and free from “vendor lock-in”. However, the discerning CIO will also be fully aware that with the benefit of not having to pay license fees in order to use the software, comes the fact that there is also no formal support available, should something go wrong.