On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 18:32 +0800, Joey S. Eisma wrote: > a. Unclear intellectual property rights
There are some factors involved here. Most open source software is pretty clear on intellectual property rights. the author maintains copyright, users/downloaders have explicit rights (but the rights vary from license to license, generally, users can use the software, but if they want to distribute the software or their changes/fixes/enhancements to the software, then they incur some responsibilities (the extent of the responsibilities varying depending on the license). Generally, FOSS software is probably going to be free (BSD usually is, by culture, but you can keep your enhancements private if you want). You *might* be referring to the IP rights of people who want to enhance or build on a FOSS base. if you want to keep your code private, build on BSD or similar licenses (if there's any BSD software that already does most of what you want and you just want to enhance it). If there isn't anything like that then you're out of luck. don't use FOSS as a base. It's a free world, and a free market, use the business model that works best for you. generally, if you want to make money like bill gates does, don't go with FOSS. if you want to be famous and admired like linus, or tom lane (postgresql, PLUG folks, reading the postgresql mailing lists, and tom lane's posts in particular is an education I could not afford to pay for, highly recommended), then go with FOSS. you have a choice, there is no issue of unclear property rights. if you don't want others to play with your source code, don't go with FOSS. There is a continuum of rights and you can choose the software to build your enhancements on based on the license of that software and the rights it gives you. If you want more rights than are given in the FOSS license, many software authors would be happy to give you the license you want for the appropriate price (e.g., mysql's dual licensing). > b. Unfairness to private sector and skewing of market forces while i realize that many PLUG members won't agree with me on this, the free market reigns. if the private sector wants to complete with free and open source software, let them produce a valuable product that free software can't compete with, at a reasonable price. As a practical matter, FOSS isn't truly free as in beer. Most FOSS will take system administrators to install and configure, and possibly programmers to tweak to fulfill the requirements of the business (or whatever entity) that needs the FOSS software installed. Possibly, FOSS will come out less expensive than closed source software. Over the long term it almost certainly *will* be cheaper, but generally at a cost of having some functionality not be available, or at a real cost of having some developers implement any missing but necessary functionality. If the functionality that isn't available is functionality that you don't need, then FOSS is golden. if you absolutely need that functionality then you'll have to pay for it, either by going to payware, or by paying developers to implement it. the "private sector" that is disadvantaged by open source adoption is almost entirely overseas (this has to do with the piracy situation in the philippines, but that's another rant). They are not filipino companies. The Philippine government has no moral requirement to keep their interests above those of citizens (although, I'm afraid that many filipino politicians and government executives have many immoral and illegal reasons to favor this private "sector", but see below, about how much I interact with government). Payments to that private sector (microsoft, symantec, oracle, etc) go straight overseas. Money paid to those companies does no work in the philippines. There is another private sector, that is the group of companies, consultants or private individuals available for employement, who would BENEFIT from open source. This private sector is the work force that would be given employment due to the necessity of installing, configuring and customizing open source. Money paid to *THIS* private sector will generally stay in the philippines, circulating and providing multiplier benefits to the economy. The question about private sector being disadvantaged reduces to the question of whether we want to pay foreigners huge amounts which will do no further good to the country (except, of course, as kickbacks to corrupt politicians and government executives, neither of which is a good reason to give that private "sector" privileges, but as a practical matter, that private "sector" will prevail anyway) and which will immediately translate into foreign currency outflows, or whether we want to pay FILIPINOs similar or smaller amounts, for the same or better functionality (often customized to the specific circumstances of the purchasing agency), which amounts will continue to do work in the Philippine economy instead of being sucked out and staying out, doing us no good. > c. Migration cost It all depends on your requirements. Most companies (and many government agencies) will find significant migration costs mainly because they are completely dependent on pirated overseas software. On the other hand, consider the costs of staying with, e.g., microsoft windows (legally licensed or otherwise) . you will get viruses, probably many viruses, no matter how well protected you are. How much does that cost you and your company in productivity every month? I work in a company with perhaps 2000 windows PCs and I would be surprised if the technical support people don't reformat and reinstall at least 1 PC a day because of viruses. The other 5 they don't reformat because they don't have the time, they just wait until something catastrophic happens, like a virus corrupting the disk so completely that the PC can't be used anymore, then they reformat and reinstall (that's that .99 PC a day, the other .01 is when some bigshot, the president, or one of the vice presidents, gets their laptop slightly messed up and technical doesn't know how to fix it, so they backup, format, install windows, install Office, install everything else, restore. After 4-5 hours of work they give the laptop back. Unfortunately, before they give up and just do the obvious thing and reinstall, they often spend 1 to 2 days trying to clean the infection. This rarely ever works with the latest malware, so that's often 1-2.5 days wasted trying to bring one laptop back to sanity. Microsoft shops suffer through that kind of stupidity because they don't know any better. even when all their software is legal, that kind of thing happens to them all the time. Even if your software (windows, MS-Office, etc) are legal, you have perhaps a 5-10% chance of Microsoft telling you that your copy of windows is not legal (WGA). And when they tell you that, you are probably out of luck. Microsoft technical support is not famed for being sympathetic, and if you're in the Philippines you are not just out of luck, you are probably totally SOL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOL because to their mind (and, frankly, pretty much in mine), almost by definition, filipinos are software pirates, so you get no sympathy, no credulity and no help from them. > d. Incompatibility with existing systems and institutional > resistance that's too general a question to answer, really. Where I work, probably only the accounting and corporate finance department *really* can't switch away from windows. and that, only because they're so busy they can't take the time to rebuild all the custom excel macros they've already implemented. Maybe another five people in engineering really need their autocad. everyone else could switch to linux. openoffice will read their word and excel files, the gimp will do what photoshop does, everything else could be done in linux. plus they can't download virus or spyware infected screensavers. That's it for actual incompatibilities that have some objective basis. The rest of the resistance is all psychological. That, we are working on slowly. Water smooths and eventually crushes stone. It'll take decades before we're even 50% open source on the desktop, but I wouldn't be surprised if we were 80-90% open source in 20 years or so. It's a slow process. But sticking with microsoft and similar payware is a stupidity for which the company isn't very happy to pay. > e. Lack of available support and service providers or support > for new hardware We haven't run across that problem. Everything we need is supported. Well, I have a problem with a WinCE device (issued by the company, and frankly I can't stand the damn thing, it's so stupid) that I can't sync addressbooks or email. But I think that's just because I don't care enough to get it working. Others have got their handheld devices syncing (SuSe has some good support, maybe ubuntu too, but I don't really know since, as I said, I don't care enough to get it working). There are real issues with winmodems, and some wifi devices. Most can be worked around though (except winmodems, those I give up on, although you could pay the money for the drivers, if you wanted them). Most windows network games won't run on linux. but then this is generally considered a Good Thing (tm) as it helps productivity. > f. Technology transfer arrangements what do you mean? we work with open source. the source is available, and usually the documentation is good or good enough. we learn what we need to and go to work. > 2. What present law & policies justify the government use and > adoption of FOSS? i don't know, and frankly, i don't care. the government is a pox upon the nation. i have as little to do with it as possible. Others may have comments on this, I'd rather not say what I really thought. > 3. Why should the Government adopt and support FOSS? I don't think the government should, necessarily. there is good FOSS and there is bad FOSS. It takes insight, foresight, intelligence and experience to know the difference. FOSS, in general, assuming your consultants know what they're doing (a lot don't) is a better choice if it's stable and is going to be around a long time, gaining features as time goes on. or if the FOSS product you focus on already has ALL the features you need and you don't care about development velocity. If you choose the wrong FOSS project (e.g., developing your dynamic web site in C, C++, for instance), you are going to fail just as you would if you were to develop it in ASP (cluelessness leads to failure). And in ASP you'd pay more. On the other hand, FOSS keeps the money paid for software development and implementation in the country. There are multiplier effects there. It is, in effect, free money. You get the same features you thought payware would give you, the money circulates in the local economy, and you help develop a stronger IT workforce. ALL of that is negated when you pay the money directly to microsoft or similar and having the money go straight to the U.S., producing a double whammy, taking foreign currency out of the Philippines, where it can't help the local economy. To be sure, the foreign software companies keep offices here and pay their people money which stays in the local economy. But that's not a lot of money, and those marketing people are a waste. Switch to FOSS and you force them to switch to selling real products (rather than expensive and insecure crap) and you develop the base of local tech talent at the same time. tiger -- Gerald Timothy Quimpo [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bopolissimus.blogspot.com http://monotremetech.blogspot.com Public Key: "gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 672F4C78" Fill what's empty, empty what's full, scratch where it itches. -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth -- Gerald Timothy Quimpo [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bopolissimus.blogspot.com http://monotremetech.blogspot.com Public Key: "gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 672F4C78" Fill what's empty, empty what's full, scratch where it itches. -- Alice Roosevelt Longworth _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Read the Guidelines: http://linux.org.ph/lists Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
