Section 14.5. Choice Requires More Than Free Software


14.5. Choice Requires More Than Free Software

One of the main lock-in problems governments and companies have is the legacy custom software already in place. Although it is reasonably easy to move your Windows users to GNU/Linux and OpenOffice and your web site from IIS to Apache Web Server, it is a lot harder to move your internal applications from one platform to the other. And without applications, there's no user adoption, of course.

Every internal or custom system that is developed is tied to a specific infrastructure software productbe it an operating system, a database, a messaging or security system, a file format, or a runtime library, you're locked in. Unless you have this solution available in the system to which you are trying to move, you'll have a hard time porting or rewriting your software.

As Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are the dominant players in Brazil, most applications that are developed are tied into their infrastructure products. Microsoft is the most obvious target of the software livre movement, since it is the king of the desktop and it powers many departmental servers where licensing issues are more visible. And Microsoft is the one that's pressuring for more licensing and more upgrades. It is really the main bully in the playground. But IBM mainframes, with thousands of legacy applications and huge Oracle databases, among all kinds of other systems, fall under the same reasoning that says choice is better. Being free to move away from those systems requires that applications are ported, and this takes time.

And once the decision to port the applications has been made, where do you port them? Is it to another specific (although software livre) OS? Does choosing any software livre solution promise freedom? Does limiting the decision to any solution that has a specific FOSS license simplify the question? Should we move to one of the great FOSS-licensed solutions (database, framework) that in fact has just a single company and no community behind it? Maybe we should put up some criteria, based on community side and adoption, that will help in choosing a high-quality FOSS product to tie our application to?

The fact is that once you choose any one product to port your system to, you're creating ties to it. If this is a software livre product, that can be a big help, but it is not enough to guarantee your freedom, your choice.

Governments and companies do not get locked into a vendor or a platform simply because they use closed software, but rather, because they develop their own applications tied to a specific product, be it a free product or a proprietary product. Once all applications are written to a product, and all data is saved into a product-specific format, to move to another offering (free or proprietary) is a big effort. And the longer the ties to that product endure, the more difficult it is to move. Vendors drive their customers to stay as much as they can. Although software livre makes you less dependent on a specific vendor (because you can make your own changes), it does not necessarily keep you from getting locked into a product....

That's why the best option is to guarantee that developed software be effectively free of product lock-in: custom applications are based on open standards, and all data is saved into open formats. That's why many of the most valuable software livre projects are not simply products. They are open source implementations of open, royalty-free standards. The powerful combination of FOSS implementations based on open standards is what gives us the choice we need.

The use of open standards that can be implemented as open source is a strong way of promoting software livre. Once applications are free from specific products and standards, it is possible to replace closed products for the FOSS implementations that have a real chance to compete and show their technical advantages. Defending software livre on technical merits is a much stronger argument to governments and companies. Keeping custom applications ready to benefit from FOSS implementations of open standards favors software livre even in the (quite common) case where the FOSS implementation is still in development.



Open Sources 2.0
Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution
ISBN: 0596008023
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 217

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