 We will talk. Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention, please? We are about to start the first session of the Debian Outreach Track. And I will be the talkmeister, as I understand. My name is Frank Brom. And Andy Orem will be our first speaker. Andy has been working with O'Reilly for a long time, probably longer than he himself can remember. And he just told me that he published the first book here in the United States on Linux. So that's a good one. And Andy's main interest is in the relationship between open source and what it and how it affects governments. And he thinks that there's a relationship between open source on the one hand and open governments. So I would like to have a applause for Andy. And let's enjoy his talk. Thank you. Hey, state of Massachusetts. Here is the statehouse. This was the scene for the most ambitious experiment in the United States to implement open source software in government. Actually, it wasn't really at the statehouse. Most of the work was done in this rather unassuming building about a block away. And here I got to talk to some people who were doing this. And some of the things that I heard from a consultant, from some staff people, from Eric Chris and Peter Quinn, some of this will get into the talk. Now let me start by asking, how many people have heard about the experiment in the mid 2000s to introduce openoffice.org into the Massachusetts state government? That's very good. I'm glad that you heard about it. It was really big news at the time. It's OK if you've gotten about it. And in a way, it's sort of an old fashioned debate. And we'll be looking at how some of the things have changed since then. But I will be talking about this. I will be also talking about some other experiments, some of which were more successful. And there are microphones here. So I'm going to go through this fairly quickly. I want to run my slides. But I do hope people feel comfortable raising their hands. And we have microphones and you can interrupt. And I also hear that we have some people using IRC who might send in questions from outside. And I really want to focus on this issue and stay for the whole thing and discuss it because it's important. Government is big. Government controls a lot of things around us. And the way that you sought was important. The US federal government spent over $13 billion in 2009 on software. That's only half as much as they spent on guided missiles. But it's still a big amount. When I go to USAspending.gov, the website, to look at it. So I want to ask them, how did you classify the software that runs guided missiles? But anyway, it's a simple figure, a crude one. But it shows that software is a big part of government. And we should be caring about what they're running. Furthermore, there are network effects. Government does affect a lot of other people. And there's a ripple effect as what they use spreads out to the people who have to deal with the government from then on. And the proprietary vendors know this. And that's why the proprietary vendors would do almost anything they can to keep their software in government. And as advocates for free software, open source, we have to be aware that we can derive a lot of benefit from these network effects. Let me ask, how many people remember the news announcements when WhiteHouse.gov, the White House site, adopted Drupal as their content management? Yeah, that's great. I'd say one third to one half of the audience heard this. Now, open source or free software has been in the government for years. For instance, when I was working on our first Linux book from 1994, I heard from a Marine who was using some version of Linux and something I didn't ask him what he was using it for. And I've met people who have been programming the government for a long time doing open source software. And the Department of Defense is all over it. So I don't know why the press made a big deal about this announcement that WhiteHouse.gov was using Drupal. But somehow, this is the big moment. Wow, now the federal government's adopted free software. We have to recognize that this is not a big moment for us really. It does not mean that lots of doors are opened up. But we've been hearing a lot of things from people in government like Vivek Kundra, who is the Chief Information Officer, Chopra, the Chief Technical Officer, and other people scattered through various agencies. So this may be a good time for open source. So this is the topics of the talk. I will talk about some of the arguments for adopting free software or open source in government. I think a lot of people have heard of those already, but it's worth going over them quickly. And then some of the more passionate arguments. Viola was talking before about passion in the Devian community. And we need passion in government, too, to make free software or open source work. I'll talk a bit about something new that's happened in the past year or two, challenges, which they often produce free open source software. I mentioned Massachusetts at the beginning. I'll be talking about that. And then a little bit about Munich at the end. I don't have a real direct contact with the Munich thing. And I want to mention why I'm going to use open source. I used open source, I think, in the title. When a lot of people here are very passionate about using the term free software, free isn't freedom. But I was told, I wrote a whole paper about free software. And one of my reviewers said, you don't use that term. Because in the government, when they think of free software, it's the wares. It's the stuff that you download where you probably don't even get the source. It's just stuff that you find on a website somewhere, and you can't really trust it. That's what they think of when they think of free software. So I would like everybody to repeat after me. Open source. Open source. Good. Get used to that. And I'm going to try to be using it through the talk, too. Because that's what they want to hear. And that's when you visit the websites. When you talk to people in government, that's the term they're using all over the place. You need to have good arguments, very strong, rational, objective arguments. Because there's always a nurse. Government is not really a fast-moving operation. And change costs a lot of money. For instance, in Munich, they had a five-year window. They wanted to see whether they could save money by using open source software in a five-year window. And it takes a lot of staff time. Furthermore, once you get into this and become an advocate for open source, the proprietary vendors will recycle every obsolete, discredited argument about security, about the viability of the support you get. You're going to hear this over and over. And you're going to have to be able to fight it very well. And government managers do not really get promoted by taking risks, as many people in the Silicon Valley do. So we'll look at some of these rational arguments. And I think many of you know them already. You can certainly go on the web and find lots of documents about them. But I want to do it very quickly, because I think we have to get through these things. Access, if you put out a request for proposals, if you put out some document that you want people to read, you're really excluding people if it requires a certain format or a certain tool to use. So there's a lot of talk about freedom of information and the Freedom of Information Act, open formats and open source software are really key to that. And Frank mentioned when he introduced me that government transparency is of interest to me. And certainly when you want a lot of people to interact with you, you want to exchange data in a way that they can understand. Vendor independence, the governments are not supposed to depend entirely on one vendor. Often if they adopt a proprietary product, that kind of locks them in in the future. It's not really in tune with what the government is supposed to be doing. It's on tune the regulations. Now we all have things in formats on tape, on disks that we can't access anymore. Open source software doesn't really help with the hardware problem, but it can help with the format problem. And when you're trying to get a land deed, for instance, the institution I was in, who we had boundary dispute and we had to go back to the government and try to get the old deeds and figure out what was done 50 years ago, you certainly want to have things in a format that you can get at any time. Whereas right now, vendors go out of business or they simply arbitrarily change the format. The Illustrated Special Government needs, I'll mention, the YouTube Controversy, which some of you may have heard of. When the Obama administration came in, there were very few elements into media and high tech stuff, and they started embedding YouTube videos in their websites. Now it seems that when you embed a video in the website, before someone looks at the video, YouTube downloads a cookie. There was a rule, an institute maybe 10 years ago, that government websites cannot download cookies to you because that was seen as a privacy violation, which is a little exaggerated, and that rule has been changed. But at the time, they were stuck. They wanted to use YouTube, but this was downloading a cookie, and that was not allowed. Does anybody remember how this was resolved? It was a special deal between the federal government and YouTube. When federal sites put a YouTube video on there, YouTube will not download a cookie. This is not true for the rest of us. If we want to put YouTube videos on our sites, we've got to get the cookie. The federal government does not have to get the cookie. However, if someone visits the government website and clicks on the video to view it, then they get the cookie. So this is the kind of silly compromise it's made in order to deal with special government requirements. But it's a good reason to adopt open source, so you don't have to deal with these things in the first place. Security, of course, think of the Department of Defense and the NSA, and all these institutions that depend a lot on security. Open source software is not necessarily more secure than proprietary software. There's a religious war around this, but we certainly know that we can have everybody in the world who's a security expert looking at the open source software. So those are the basic arguments. There are many variations, and you could probably find arguments, but those are the basic arguments for telling people that they should adopt open source. I didn't mention cost in there. And one reason is that it takes a lot of effort to migrate, and we'll look at some of those problems later. Another problem is that, as I mentioned, the proprietary vendors love to have their software being used by government, and they will lower their costs. So there have been situations where the small governments have said that they will adopt open source software as a kind of bargaining chip. And then the proprietary vendor comes in and says, oh, we'll lower our costs. And then they go along with that. And I guess that means that everybody else who has a proprietary software has to pay more. But it's their bargain. But the format is really almost more important than the software. A lot of you may be working in institutions where you don't use Office, Microsoft Office, and you don't use openoffice.org, or KOS, or any other things. You may be using Google Docs or some other thing like that. And the government has to do that, too. I think the government's big enough to provide its own service. They shouldn't be storing their key documents in Google Docs. But anyway, software as a service is growing. There's a big bait in the free software movement about that. But it makes it even more important that you know what your format is. So you can use a competing service. The services need to operate so that you can get your data out in case the service goes bad and so forth. The format is a problem that most people don't think about it. Most people don't think about what is really underneath MP3WMA, all those things that they use. And a little of the free software movement when developed, totally open formats. Most people are still using the ones that have some kind of patent, some kind of licensing associated with them. So the government doesn't realize what they're doing a lot of the time. They say, let's put up a video on YouTube. And that means that you cannot download it on certain computers legally. There are certain things that are outlawed because they don't pay the license fee and so forth. The copyright office, you may have heard of this about a week ago. The copyright office issued a new ruling and it said that the software that is used to interpret proprietary formats, this software is no longer illegal. Well, they didn't exactly say that. They said that special people like scholars and librarians have a good legal reason to use these tools that can decrypt DVDs and stuff like that. So that effectively makes it legal because I think you could say, well, I'm a scholar. But it still doesn't really cover something like watching the YouTube video. So the government is doing these things. They are actually contributing to a culture of proprietary in formats. It's sort of like when someone gets up in the morning, they don't say, I'm going to make my kid obese today. They just say, my kid doesn't like milk so I want to put a little bit of chocolate syrup in the milk. And this is why I say that the closed formats are the high fructose corn syrup of the computer world. We don't really know what we're doing when we use them. Now, besides the rational arguments, you need to develop a sense of fashion, a sense of commitment in the government agency. And I've seen this in all the examples that I've seen, and I'll talk a bit about some of the examples. Because the benefits of change are far off and uncertain. There will be all kinds of technical problems that you'd inspect. For instance, in the Munich case that I'll discuss at the end, I read on one website about they converted all their clients in one site to GNU Linux. I think the Debbie and GNU Linux, in fact. And then they found that the clients couldn't communicate with each other or communicate with a central server. Because a central server was running an unnamed proprietary system. It did not implement DHCP properly. DHCP is the way everybody communicates to each other on their local network by assigning IP addresses. So they couldn't do this. So I imagine what they had to do was to speed up the deployment of GNU Linux on the central server. So this is the kind of problem you wouldn't anticipate. You probably can't anticipate until it happens. And you need to have some conviction. You need to have a real passion for what you're doing to get you through. And finally, you need passionate arguments because people don't respond. I mean, people like to say they're a rational objective, but who really is? Now, it's useful to have somebody talk who backs what you're doing, someone who's charismatic, someone who people listen to. And it's useful to get an endorsement from this. So some of the things that have happened that have helped from the top down via Libra Foundation. This was in 2001. It was one of the early bills in Latin America that said that we want to use free software. Brazil formed this technical committee on the implementation of software in 2003. And then Hugo Chavez in Venezuela announced, I don't know how far some of these things are going. I know in the Brazilian case, they did not actually pass a law. There were attempts in Brazil to pass a law, which didn't pass. Some of the states passed laws. But even though they didn't have as much of a formal commitment at the top, they have achieved a lot more than some of the other Latin American countries. And this probably has to do with the degree of technical education in Brazil, the degree of development of the economy as a whole, lots of factors. Certainly, they have the free software conference. They are fissile. And they have companies, including some of my authors, work that teach how to use GNU Linux. So there's a lot of people working very hard to create the infrastructure. Whereas, for instance, in Peru, I've read that they wanted to have a lot more free software. And they had some trouble getting the, I should say, open source software into the government because they don't have enough trained people to do it. You need a lot of structure to do this right. Peru is interesting because it shows a trajectory. It shows how often open source makes progress. First, there was a practical problem, taking this from an interesting article that you can get online too. There was a practical problem. Someone was a consultant going to various cities and states in Peru. And he discovered that they were inconsistent in their application of the tax code. They were actually being unfair to people. And part of the problem was they had inconsistent software. And the solution is to give them open source software. We may have some of the same things going on in the United States around health care. Because there are dozens of vendors with extremely expensive systems that don't work together. The government is now saying, finally, you need meaning and use, which means you have to be able to take the data out and use it in ways that improve the quality of care. So a lot of open source advocates are hoping this will be an impetus to adopt open source software because it's consistent because of interoperability and also because of lower cost. So this consultant was from the open source software. And he got a senator named Villanueva, interested in this, introduced a bill that was immediately attacked by Microsoft and immediately attacked by the US ambassador. So then a movement grew up around it. Not just in Peru, but all around Latin America and even internationally. And there were people who were committed to the idea of freedom. And they wanted to have open access to government. They wanted to have more involvement of the public. These were the sort of things that drove their commitment to open source software. So the bill was passed. And I believe I may have talked about this already. OK, so that was an example of how the practical need and the ideological need combined to produce a good result of the bill that was passed promoting open source software and some action in that area. So it's going to have people at the top giving some support for it. They have Vivek Kundra and Anish Chopra in Washington talking about open source software. It means that you can at least get the discussion started. People can't save you. That's a bunch of simply faced teenagers. And it means this is particularly important, as we see in the Massachusetts case later. When you have people at the top supporting you, they probably will not come in and defund you or put barriers in your way or just snipe at you. But it's not enough to have somebody at the top. Because in that situation, like the one I suggested in Munich where the server was not allowing the clients to communicate, this has to be overcome at the grassroots. It has to be overcome by managers right in the department that are implementing the software. So let's look at these managers. They have to have a sophisticated sense of the software. They should be previously committed to understand at least open source. And they can't just have good intentions. We'll see some of the ways that it helped in the Massachusetts and Munich cases for people to really understand in a deep way the open source or free software. They have to understand, for instance, that there is a developer community out there. You've probably all heard the phrase that people like to use about proprietary software. At least it's one throat to choke. I feel like I've been choked right now. There's not a terrible way to deal with a vendor. Isn't a horrible image to use? So it is good to have support from vendors. But it's also good to be able to interact with the developers, especially such a capable community as the Debian developers. For instance, this conference is entirely run by volunteers, including the audio and visual people. I'm very impressed with that. The audio and visual even is done by volunteers here. You have to take responsibility for your own installation upgrades. You don't get a visit from the vendor. It's very helpful to do bug fixes, to do your own work and collaborate with the community, and in general, to understand the development cycle and why certain things might be postponed and so forth. These are the things that a manager knows if he's already sophisticated about open source. I want to stop for a moment to suggest that you go visit a web page, opensourceformerica.org awards. This was started by a bunch of companies just a little over a year ago. O'Reilly, my employer, was one of the companies. One of the big backers is Red Hat. Sun was also a big backer, but Oracle has not pushed it in the same way. Anyway, there's an interesting set of awards that you can look at here for individuals and for institutions. Unfortunately, they are focusing just on the federal government. They won't accept, I don't think they'll accept an award for somebody in New York or somebody in the Netherlands, but I suggest that you check it out. We'll take out the organization. I also want to talk about a new movement. As I said, in the past year or two, there's a new movement in governments that want to get beyond the heaviness of the procurement system and try to get some quick applications, sometimes open source. What they do is a down to contest, sometimes with money, as a prize and sometimes just with publicity. And they put up some data. This is very important to actually give people data to work with. You may have heard the announcement maybe six weeks ago that the Department of Health and Human Services put up a lot of data about all kinds of things epidemiological and so forth about the United States. And they want people to download this and do interesting comparisons, maybe the cost of health care in different areas, maybe the incidence of different diseases, diabetes in different areas. And if you really want to see interesting health care data sets, go to Portuguese and go to the website for the Brazilian Ministry of Health. It's amazing what they have online. All kinds of data about reimbursements of hospitals, about births, about deaths, about all kinds of things. So the data is very important because that gives people something to work with. And then submissions can be uploaded where they can be reviewed. Sometimes people do this in open source and sometimes they don't. I'll talk about Portland a bit, which did insist on open source. And the public can also get involved. The public can usually go on these sites and suggest an application that they would like to have, like municipal data, say municipal transit data in Boston, the bus lines and the subway lines are trying to put their data online. And people can write submissions. So this is sort of the basis of the challenge approach. Apps for democracy may have been the first one. Vivek Kundra, before he entered the federal government, did this in Washington. They did it for two years. And then they kind of got a lot of interest. They didn't find the funds to do another one. We'll look at this problem later. And then just did one and just announced the awards for that. And this one is all, you know, you have to make it open source when you submit an application. I want to mention a bit about the Department of Defense. I was talking about missiles before. And some people have a lot of conflicts over what the Department of Defense does. But I want to say that they are not a conservative institution as they often are portrayed. I think they are very dynamic institutions. They know that they have to change a lot because the nature of war is changing. They have something they put up with Collabnet, which is a major player in the open source field. It's called Ford's Dot Mill. And it is actually not really open source, but they invite companies in there. Some of the code could be shared as a platform to produce other things. And other code is not shared. It's closed source. But it's an important example of this kind of sharing, this kind of collaboration to produce new software. And it's not just to save money. I'm saying over and over again in this talk that you can't depend on cost savings as a reason to open source. You have to have other reasons. In the case of Department of Defense, they know that field conditions are changing all the time. What was true yesterday is not true today. The people who are down there in the trenches literally have to be able to adopt the software to new needs. And that's where they are doing this. So what challenges are trying to do is to change the procurement model. The usual procurement model is very old fashioned, a bunch of managers get in the room. What does your staff do? What does your staff do? What do we need? Then they submit their requirements to a vendor. They spend a long time choosing a vendor, giving the requirements to the vendor. Vendor takes a bunch of soda to produce it. So you recognize here something called the waterfall model. The waterfall model is still useful. I would say for something like a guided missile might be the right thing. But as you know, it's credited for most things that interact with people, and most things that ordinary people are working in their day-to-day work. So the ways this can be evaded perhaps to keep the awards small, not to have awards at all. And it permits a much more agile development process. The challenge approach requires, first of all, the data, as I mentioned before. The government should be willing to use data. It has to make a big publicity push. You have to know your programmers. It's not enough to do publicity. You have to really know who the key people are in your area, as Portland did. They were pretty hip. They knew a lot of people, both in open source and non-open source areas. And you don't always have to have a monetary prize, but it can be useful. The challenge approach is also limited. One thing, once you get the application, it may be hard to keep it maintained. If the public is using it, if they want the data and want the app, it may be enough to push the government to do it. But as I was told in Portland, politicians love to do things and get a lot of publicity from. And they say, look how cool we are. We've got this challenge. We're doing a new thing. But then the incremental work of slowly releasing more data, updating the application. They can't get big headlines for that. And so it's hard to get them to do it. Community pressure is needed. We have to ask for more data. We have to insist that the data is updated when it's released. A non-profit may be a good way to do this. There are certain ways to keep the non-profits honest. You make sure that they have open meetings. You make sure their documents are open, have conflict of interest rules, and so forth. There is no central search facility. This is something I hope gets fixed. So New York is doing it. Yes, New York even has trying to open some of their data. This may be hard to believe in a city where the transitory could just stop running a train some morning and not even tell anybody. So I had to walk two miles to get here today. But New York is part of it. Portland, Chicago, there's a lot of cities doing it. But they're all doing it individually. And it would be nice to have a nice source forage-like or GitHub-like place where they could put their stuff and everybody could find it. But the office does not yet handle the big ticket items. That's as the openoffice.org issue that I'm going to discuss. It doesn't handle things where the government is spending millions and millions of dollars on something. So we still have to push for open source in other ways. And that's what I'm going to get to in Massachusetts. Talk a little bit about the experience there. We did not have a charismatic leader, an ideologically driven leader in Massachusetts when this open source effort started. Our leader at the time was Governor Romney, who remember is conservative, a little bit wonkish. But he did do something really useful, his Secretary of Administration and Finance. And there is a media page for Eric Chris. He worked with Peter J. Quinn, who I also talk to, functioned more or less as CIO and actually got that position eventually. And they were the people who were really driving this. Eric Chris had worked in the high tech industry in Massachusetts, so he was acquainted with open source software, acquainted with a lot of issues, as you will see about software. And he was going to be a risk taker. Now the project started. As I mentioned in Peru, there was a particular practical problem that kicked off this open source movement. Now a slightly different thing happened in Massachusetts. The legislature realized that there was no plan for how to acquire software, no kind of road map. And they asked for one. They probably had no idea and would have been horrified if they realized that where this was going. But they asked for a plan. And open source came as a solution. There was one particular interest. They certainly knew about open source, Chris and Quinn. But there was one interesting thing that happened here. Microsoft released a new version of Office 2000 that had an XML format. And there was a patent on part of this. Now think about what it takes for someone, say, an administration finance to look at this. Most people in administration finance do not really look at the software at all. They don't really look at the format underlying the software. Most of them would have no idea, at least at this stage in 2003, what an XML format is. And for Quinn and Chris to actually check and see that there was a patent on it, so that we had some really pretty extraordinary people in our ship in Massachusetts. So they found this patent. And they thought about the worst case. Probably Microsoft wouldn't do this. But Microsoft could say, hey, anybody who goes into the town hall for a birth certificate or wants to get a building permit, you've got to pay us a license fee, because you're using the Microsoft Office format. So they were worried about this. And they asked Microsoft to give up their rights to the patent. Microsoft wouldn't. And so they decided on a regulation saying that open source would be preferred in government, which is similar to what was done in Peru. Now the Mass Software Council visited them right away, a lot of pressure. So they backed off a little bit. They just said they would open source in a fair manner. But this was enough to get the migration going. And the migration was handled in a very disciplined way. They started out very well. They looked at all the departments just what the department needs were. Munich did this too, perhaps even more thoroughly. So some departments really needed, for instance, Microsoft Excel. OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet was not quite as good as Excel in the areas at that time. And Excel used Macros. Some of these people depended on Macros, which OpenOffice.org did not support. But most people in the government were just using Microsoft Office to read documents or to make very simple memos. And they could easily move over to ODF and OpenOffice.org. And they started to train people. They hired consultants and so forth. Peter Quinn had a study showing that they would save money by using open source software. The Massachusetts Legislature was not happy at all about where things were going. And they actually demanded that an auditor be brought in, which is pretty unusual. But the auditor backed up Quinn. He said, yes, it will save money. There was an interesting setback, which is a useful lesson here. Microsoft, we always openOffice.org, did not have accessibility just for vision impaired. Microsoft is not a great player in this area either. Up to the 90s, they released windows. They had nothing for blind or vision impaired people. But the community got together and insisted they do something. And when they put in features for blind and limited vision people, they did it in such a way that it was proprietary. It was locked into Microsoft stuff. So even if you're running other software on windows, you couldn't use the same features. Still, they had the features openOffice.org did not. And a coalition of the vision impaired descended on the state office to say you can't use openOffice.org because it doesn't have these features. What is wrong with this reasoning? Don't give someone the microphone. What is wrong with the reasoning of the vision impaired people who said this? Yes, they can add features. This is what people didn't understand. They were thinking still in the mindset of proprietary software where somebody gives you the point, you take it or leave it. And openOffice.org, of course, they could have worked. The community could have worked with them. And eventually, it took time, but openOffice.org did add these features. But this is still a good lesson to learn. When you start something, a migration, you have to think of all the strengths and weaknesses of your software. This little thing, and Quinn admitted he had made a mistake. He should have thought of this in advance. And we also need to educate the public more about the potential of open-source software to evolve, to meet new needs. So this is a small setback. It didn't really hurt things. The big setback came, and we really, really don't know. The state legislature decided to slash a bunch of funding. And it could have just been one of the spats that they always have with the governor. The governor and the legislature in Massachusetts are always feuding, whether the governor is Democrat or Republican, it doesn't really matter. Or there might have been something else behind it. We don't really know, but they defunded it. And then there's another setback. Chris and Quinn departed for various reasons. The IT department said that Microsoft's XML would also be okay as an open format. I'll talk a little bit about that. I'm right disappointed in this. I think it would be fine to say, look, we've tried to do a migration. We don't have the money. We'll have to stick with Microsoft Office. We'll look at openoffice.org and ODF in the future. But they didn't say they said that they could use XML which was rather a setback in terms of publicity. You could enter this into your Bing engine and you can find out all the documents you would ever want to read and more about this. So I won't say much about this. Just say that OOXML was created in direct recognition that state governments and others wanted an XML format. And ODF had an XML format, had an open format so Microsoft realized they had to have one too. And of course it's not really open even though it's over 6,000 pages long. It has all kinds of problems that are not fully specified which you can find by going online. The standardization process was not only a travesty and there was a lot of pressure from both sides. Both the pro-Microsoft and the anti-Microsoft forces were doing a lot of political stuff here. But it really challenged where the sort of consensus-based open standards approach was going to work when you have highly political pressure from large companies. But OOXML was really in advance. Before OOXML we had RDF. We had other formats that were very hard to work with. Now there are a lot of new programs that can work with Microsoft formats and OOXML. So all the Microsoft programmers can thank the ODF and Office.org community for what they've done to help them to get OOXML. So I have said enough about Massachusetts. You can see the strengths, you can see the weaknesses. I wanted to end on a slightly more positive note. So I'm going to talk just a little bit about the Munich experience which I had to read about. I couldn't actually interview people in there. They wanted to go to both CanoeLinux and OpenOffice.org. They also had a practical stimulus, the end of life for Windows NT 2004. And so they presented the city council with two possibilities. They did a very serious requirements analysis. And they said on the one hand we can upgrade to Microsoft, on the other hand we can migrate to Duby and CanoeLinux and OpenOffice.org. Now it takes such a lot of work to migrate that they could not show that within five years they would recoup their costs. Actually it would have been cheaper to upgrade to Microsoft Office and pay those licenses. And even so, the city council decided to move to CanoeLinux and OpenOffice.org. Here is one page of the requirements analysis. You can see some interesting things if you can read the small type. I have to go back here, let's see, I think this will do it. For instance, impact on system stability, impact on the appeal of working conditions. This is just one of many, many things they were considering. They went way beyond the question of cost and even the question of technology. For instance, you can challenge everything. For instance, do you need software to create PDFs? Maybe not. If a lot of documents are going to be used only online and you never print them, maybe you don't need this software. So the managers to really delve deep and they looked at all the strategic as well as the cost issues. The cost said, upgrade to Windows. You won't recoup your cost of migrating to CanoeLinux within five years, but they decided to migrate anyway. And the city council gave its backing, which is really important because they would not pull a trick like the Massachusetts legislature did. They said, go ahead. And the people doing the migration could really depend on that. Implementation briefly had a five year cycle. That's over now. I think it took a little bit longer than they expected years for planning. 15,000 workstations run opusoffice.org. That's workstations. And 2,500 are running CanoeLinux. The WN version, pretty sure. ODF is the standard for exchange. So that's a pretty good success story. Something, I did an article related to this talk. You can get this article in the Journal of Information Technology and Politics. And they said they would also release it in their Creative Commons license online. It hasn't been done yet. But I wanted to summarize about the right way to move to open source software. Summarizing the talk, we have to emphasize strategic goals, not just one or two short term things or costs. We have to make sure the people who can fund or do the project are on board. You have to have managers with a deep insight who can understand things like whether it supports the vision impaired, whether it has the protocols necessary to communicate with our systems. And you have to have passion to carry you through. So I think Munich showed all these things. Munich showed a way that we can move to open source. If we can learn from this lesson and from other lessons, both positive and negative, we can enjoy the benefits that they have in Munich. And since there were really no questions at the time, I hope you have some questions now, and you can also talk to me later. Maybe someone can get the microphone. Thank you. I don't see the microphone. I don't see the shout now. And I will repeat the question. Got a microphone on high. I thank you for the talk. First of all, recently, going back to the winter, I was up in Albany for the Open Government Conference in Albany, New York. And I went there for the whole day, and their definition of open government was we put something on the web, it's open. My concern that I brought up as I had a question and answer period was, well, one, if I have a Linux operating system on my home computer, and I want to get to the data that you've now made up it, and their response, like Marie Antoinette was, go out and get a Windows system or Macintosh. So I think there's a definite need for an ADA-like legislation to guarantee rights of people who use alternative operating systems when it comes to accessing government data. Also, applying for a government job requires that you have a PDF application that allows form filling in and stuff like that. And I think we need to, I don't know if you want to expand on this, but how can we guarantee rights of people who, you know, the other side of the coin of accessing the government, not necessarily the government using open source, but us using open source and getting to everything else in an equal fashion. Yeah, I like your comment. That was a great story. And I certainly, if you had a law or a regulation, that would be, that would be useful. It would be a nice top-down approach. There are other things we might do. You've now announced this problem. We can shame them in Albany. We can point to what they try to do in Massachusetts and what some people in the federal government are trying to do. We've got to move in that direction when we're in there. I suppose, at some point, there should be some high-level regulation or even a law so that people have access. And this is also, we have to remind them, I sort of mentioned at the talk, we have to remind them that this is not just guaranteeing people like you, the WN expert access. This is also guaranteeing yourself access. The government wants to get access to these documents 50 years from now. That's what we've thought of it. Frequently, you get that immediate reaction because you're talking to people who feel like you're asking them to support your operating system and they're terrified of it. They have no idea what it looks like, how it works. And you get that answer a lot. I think from any kind of bureaucracy where you've got front-level help desk line staff, they have a set of stock answers for people who have Windows and Mac systems. And so they feel like they're on okay ground there. And if you throw something that's outside of what they've been trained in, it's just, it's scary, actually. I think that's a reasonable reason why you get that immediate pushback most of the time. You may remember the story back from the 1970s or early 80s. And I don't know if it's a popular or real, but a lot of people repeated the story that General Motors was worried about foreign cars, but they looked out the window and all they saw was American cars outside the corporate headquarters as well. They said, oh, there's no problem with foreign cars. The government may be the same way when they're all just, you know, they use IE, they use Windows and so forth. So you said that we have to be prepared to object to the arguments of proprietary software advocates. Can you expand a little bit on that? So what do they say typically? I think there's a common, they commonly say that open source software can't be secure or because it's open, that means that the, they can simply say it can't be high quality, but they can also say if it's open, that means that malicious intruders will find the security flaws and neglect them before we have a chance to fix them. That's an old argument. Of course, security, the malicious intruders seem to be able to deassemble the proprietary software pretty quickly. And I don't know why the EVD industry has not been able to create a format that can't be hacked, so this is the kind of control back of them. It was an interesting thing in the Peruvian case. Microsoft came in and they were the ones who tried to be the rational people. The Peruvians were driven partly by nationalistic goals, partly by rational goals to improve the software they were using and partly sort of the goals of freedom. So Microsoft said, hey, let's not talk about all these passionate things, all these emotional things. Let's just look at objectively whether the software does what you want and they thought that they could win simply by being more, because their software could be proven to be better in some way. But you'll hear a lot of complaints about support and just a lot of complaints that you can't trust free software. That's sort of arguments. You've given a couple of examples which are faiths in the media, as it were, the Massachusetts and the Munich transitions, but I was kind of assuming that there was now an awful lot of this going on and we didn't get to hear about it because it wasn't newsworthy anymore, but maybe that's wrong and, in fact, it's not happening. Do you know? I'm sorry, what is... Are there, in fact, lots of transitions to the course going on and it's just not a newsworthy thing anymore? Oh, sir, yeah, there's extra Madura in Spain and I have a lot of trouble and I will admit I have been doing a lot of research and having trouble getting information. Sometimes I do a lot of web searching after I heard about some of the software announcements and all these high-level announcements. We're going to move to free software in Latin America. I turned on the Spanish and Portuguese and Google and I did a lot of searching articles and I couldn't find any articles about actual successful transitions. I thought, did Google and Bing fail to update their indexes for the past five years? And then I thought, well, are there things going on but people just are too busy doing it and they don't talk to reporters? I don't know and I know there are things going on. Some people have been able to visit those countries and talk to the people in the government. Help me that. And I also, I try to use the internet to get information. I talk to people who are in academia and people who go to conferences and say, please put me in touch with some of the guys on the ground, the Peter J. Quinn's and the people working under them in these countries. I haven't been able to get very far so I talk about what I find and I'm sure there's a lot more going on. Hi, thanks for your talk and I had a question, first about the Munich experience. You mentioned that it wasn't, that they couldn't figure out if they could make the transition economical in a five year window. And I was wondering if there's any kind of long term tracking on that project and other projects and then as a comment on the thing that you just said about how you have been looking in Google for projects, it seems almost like a natural to have some kind of central reporting place for people to share their experiences and I was wondering if you had any knowledge of projects like that or if you would do something like that yourself? I haven't heard of it. It would be a great idea to have a place where people report back. There's one person, Florian Schiesel has been blogging a lot and doing presentations and I got some information from those things. But particular whether there's cost savings, how much it cost, I haven't seen anything in those and it would be nice to get that, okay? Yeah. I wanted to add something about all these success stories about migration. You mentioned some good examples. I wanted to add the one of the French, Gendarmerie, we have as a, there are two police corps in France, police and Gendarmerie. Gendarmerie is military organization and migrated first from office to open office for like 70,000 computers or each and every computer and are currently planning to migrate some of their end user workstation to actually open to. And we have the French Debian community has strong connection with these people and particularly Zach. I think you met already some people from the Gendarmerie and we intend to work on keeping these connections very close. We may want to talk about this experience. Great. I'll talk to you, yes. I have another less interesting experience and less successful, sorry. Okay, so I'll talk later with you about. Yeah, that will be a short one, yes. I mentioned in the previous Debian conference some stories about my experience to Bhutan who adopted GNU Linux for their national distribution. So in a small country in Ilimalayas and I think this is probably a failure story because they developed a national Linux distribution and I never heard about it since then probably because the proprietary software vendor made a lot of work afterwards to go over it and implement something that was suitable for their needs. Yes, and I said the proprietary vendors are very jealous. They don't want free software or open source software in governments because that legitimizes it. It means other people start to use it and so forth. I think one more question, maybe, right? Yeah. I think this will be relatively quick. Thanks for the talk. But everything seems to be focused here on desktops and I'm wondering if that's because kind of on the server side, we don't feel like there's more of a war there because all the discussion, at least all the good stories, bad stories seem to be focused on desktops orientations. Is that, and I'm just wondering where you see the server side of it. The new stuff that I was talking about, the challenges are often mobile apps and of course there's a whole nest of issues about free software and open source on those, but often it's about people getting access to government data. So it's more about people in the field and a lot of mobile applications. I think a lot's going on in the server area and the government that people are using Apache and so forth in government. So I guess a lot of the more publicized cases though have to do with migrating people on the desktop and this is where the average person who works in government sees what's going on. Thank you. I would like to thank Andy for his marvelous presentation. I think you gave us a very lucid insight in what happened in several open source projects and your ideas. Thank you very much and applause.