HB1197 Status And Freakonomics

[Jeff Kinz]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 06:20:20AM -0500, Seth Cohn wrote:
> HB1197 was voted ITL (Inexpedient to Legislate) yesterday by the NH
> House.  This was no surprise, as the Executive Dept committee voted to
> kill it by 15 to 1, and released the following report on it:
> 
> HB 1197, establishing a committee to study requiring state government
> to consider using open source software when acquiring new software. 
> INEXPEDIENT TO LEGISLATE
> 
> Rep. James B. Coburn for Executive Departments and Administration:  A
> sub-committee discussed this issue and determined that the major main
> frame applications are probably not available in open source software.
>  There is software called "open office" that is similar to a Microsoft
> product installed on most desktops.  Upon checking with the Office of
> Information Technology, 

Hi Seth,
This phrase, "checking with the office of information technology', seems
key to me.  My guess is that the resident technology people have no
experience with or interest in Open Source.  I have found that whenever
you are trying to introduce open Source to a noncommercial organization,
such as a school system or a town or any form of government the very
first and most important group of people to convince are the people who
are the current technology gurus for that organization.  In this case I
am using the term "guru" very loosely.

The resident technology "experts" have an established relationship with
the representatives or politicians running the show.  This relationship
is based on the technology people taking care of the needs of the
representatives or the politicians and of course recognizing that the
representatives and the politicians hold a great deal of power the
technology people have made sure to take "very good" care of them.

As a result the technology people have a high level of credibility with
those politicians.  So the politicians will take whatever they are told
by these people as gospel.

Until there is some high-level technology person within that government
body who is an open source advocate it will be difficult to make
progress convincing the politicians that open source is the preferable
technology to use, or even a viable alternative.

In fact the only reason that the Massachusetts government has made some
progress is due to the chief technology officer for the executive branch
of the state, and his boss, and the head of I. T. for the executive
branch were all being in favor of the Open Document Format.

And even with these three high-powered, high-level sponsors the ODF
movement in Massachusetts is receiving huge amounts of resistance and in
the short-term may not prevail.  (In the long term, I believe that open
source software and open standards will become the accepted and
preferred choices.  The problem is, how long is long-term?)

> it was determined that the state does not have
> the technical resources to control or support such software.  Vote 
> 15-1.
> 
> Yes, you read that right:  Let's not have a study committee to look
> into this, because we already know that open source doesn't work on
> mainframes, and of course, we don't have any technical resources for
> this sort of thing now in OIT, so lets not have a study committee
> might see that we'd save millions (and thus could afford to hire a few
> helpdesk staff to support it).

This is a typical political maneuver to kill the proposal by making
sure it never gets out of committee.  It sucks.  It's slimy.  And
sleazy.  And it's the way things seem to work when dealing with any
democratically elected body of representatives.  Inevitably the choices
made by that body aren't made based on what is "right",but are made
based on "what will get me reelected or will gain me the power within this
body so that I can have the leverage I need to get reelected?".

Of course none of that is any surprise to us.  The problem is what do we
do about it?

The most efficient path to getting open source used by a government body
is to convince those resident technology people that it is to their
benefit to use open source.  The problem with this path is that it is
frequently not to the benefit of the bureaucrat in charge of IT to use
open source.  Why?  Because open source saves money, time and manpower.

I just finished reading a fantastic book named "Freakonomics". it's a
great book, only about 200 pages, written in a way that is enjoyable to
read and easy to follow.  In other words it is not a typical
economics book at all.  The author tells great stories about how more
closely examining the economics of particular groups of people reveals
often startling information about what truly is motivating them and what
they perceive to be beneficial to themselves.