Open Source As Policy

A draft study released this week by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for
Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) looks at the various policies
and legislation being considered by various levels
of government around the globe.

The 33-page document provides an exhaustive list of various initiatives and their current status.
More than 45 nations have had some level of public-policy initiatives or
discussion about open source according to the report. However, the
report’s authors note that, “slightly more than half of the initiatives
never went beyond the proposal stage.”

The report also found that in the cases where there was an approved policy
or initiative, there was little tangible action toward an actual
migration. There were no limitations or requirements to use
open source software in more than 80 percent of cases, even though the approved
policies either encouraged or expressed a preference for open source
software.

Perhaps even more indicative of the seeming lack of concrete policies to
enforce open source migration, the report found that even in the cases
where governments actually mandated the use of open source, none of them
have been “entered into force.” Furthermore no government has
forbidden the use of non-open source proprietary products so far
according to this study.

In the CSIS report’s view, what all of these initiatives have done is to
essentially produce a “technological neutrality.”

“The outcome of these efforts is neither a ban on proprietary software nor
an endorsement of OS products as innately superior,” the report states.

The report also notes
that one of the reasons governments consider open source in the first
place is a desire to reduce cost and to encourage a local indigenous
software industry.

Government adoption of open source and Linux around the globe has been a
bit of a mixed bag. Munich, Germany, the poster child for government Linux adoption in
Europe, recently hit a
bump on its road to adoption with concerns over software patents. In
Asia, the nascent Asianux Linux distribution, which has ties
to the Chinese government, seems to be
building momentum
in the Asian market. The Chinese government also uses Linux in part of its
rail system operations.
In Brazil, IBM has been helping with the Linux push
by opening an
open source consultancy in the region to help facilitate migration and
adoption.

The United Nations has also
gotten into the game
with its own agency that exists to help promote the use of open source software. And in the
United States, California has recently been holding hearings
with open source advocates.