Commentary

In today's increasingly corporate-intensive society, the argument can be made that you as a consumer wield more influence with your € or $ vote than with your political vote.

When you vote for a politician and that politician turns around and kills someone's puppy, that makes you culpable.

When you give your money to companies like Apple and Microsoft, you are also culpable.

I'm clocking in eleven years of working with open source this year. Despite coming a long way in those years, it still appears to defy reason that the (often and not always) astronomically higher price/performance proposition of open source has not made it ubiquitous and the default choice. I don't believe in an open source software monoculture, but there is still too many examples of organisations acquiring expensive and inferior non-open source software when the technical and financial characteristics of the open source option were superior.

Looking from my admittedly narrow vantage point over European public IT procurement, I see today a structural and very fundamental incompatibility between how enterprise IT is expected to be transacted and how open source lends itself to commercial activity.

The symptoms are easy to spot. Take the recent example of the Hungarian government allocating over €40 million to open source. Part of the reason they were forced to such a drastic gesture was that the value of the contract they were putting out to tender was above the threshold set forth in the European directives (in Denmark, I think this is roughly around DKK 1,400,000 or roughly €200,000). Think about that, two hundred thousand euros. With proprietary licensing models, it isn't too difficult to hit that kind of threshold. The threshold is in fact set that high because it has been geared to traditional software procurement, which has been proprietary and expensive enough to suggest a threshold of €200,000.

Towards the end of last year, I was advisory solution architect on a project where I assessed that Alfresco was the right base product to build on. This was a very large project for the Danish public sector (high 8 digits at the very least in Danish kroner), and the bid team understandably wanted commercial technical recourse. Making a long story short, I got in touch with Matt Asay who got us on the phone with the European representatives (one of whom was actually on vacation), and pretty soon we had technical and economic estimates from Alfresco. All within 120 minutes, at 8 in the evening. I think that anecdote obviates the need for any superlatives; if I ever have my own company, that will be my benchmark for responsiveness.

I must confess, I'm writing this as part of a conspiracy with Roberto Galoppini. Alfresco is on our maps, enterprise open source is on our maps, and public sector open source is also. I have not seen much Alfresco in the European public sector and none in the Danish public sector, and this is an unfortunate misrepresentation of what Alfresco could represent.

While the Swedes are busy finding more representatives of the recording industry they can talk into participating in various roles in legal action against filesharers, I thought to write a post to exhibit what is likely to turn out to be my supreme ignorance of IP law.

Having set your expectations appropriately low, how's this for a proposition:

Torrent file authors assert intellectual ownership over their Metainfo file by prominently displaying a copyright notice by its link on the webpage it is uploaded to. A license to use the bittorrent file is granted to users which contains a clause that the licensee will not sue any peers encountered during the download. Violation of this clause renders the license void, in effect making the suing party a copyright violator.

So, the Hungarian government has launched a policy to use half of the IT budget on open source software. Effective in a few weeks, which in the alternate universe of public administration is equivalent to yesterday.

The more innocent corners of the open source community have been making much of this and expecting great mileage; it almost feels like a scaled down version of when Munich announced their open source intentions.

It's an extremely drastic move (and grossly miscalculated move were it even genuine), but what is really behind it?

I see you're firing up to 6,000 people. Analysts say you're in more trouble than a pregnant cheerleader, and that you've been that way for a lot longer than nine months. Analysts think you should spin off your hardware business (but then, they thought you should spin off Java back in 2003...) And those are your small problems.

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has been getting some attention here and there, mainly for the potential for file sharers to get disconnected. Turns out there's a lot more on the horizon; quite apart from the agreement's potential to ban fairly innocuous practises such as deep linking (boy Google, are you in trouble), the European Commission's Directorate-General for Trade has been soliciting. (pause) Ahem, that was worth the sentence fragmentation. To resume, the DG has been soliciting input and commentary from various stakeholders.

The Global Intellectual Property Center under the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (the wold's largest lobbyist organization) has responded with this letter (that's a pdf link). It's a really good read, and I commiserate unequivocally. With the mothers who raised these slimeballs.

I have been making myself scarce on my own website of late; when you move back to your homeland after 12 years and pick up a very exciting new position with a place as cool as Rambøll Informatik, you'll tend to drop off the radar for a bit.

Thanks to Pinse I now have a long(er) weekend, and there is one thing I wish to piss and moan about. I want to call out the Danish Welfare Ministry.

The story goes like this. Eight Danish municipal authorities are moving towards e-voting and the Welfare Ministry (for byzantine reasons which with any luck will be tackled in the comment section of this post) is stakeholder in requirements definition and tender formulation. And the Welfare Ministry has warned the municipalities against mandating open source.