Industry group urges government to think twice on open source (ZDNet) [LWN.net]

More FUD for the day, this time from the UK. Intellect is introduced in the article as a group which represents about 1,000 UK IT companies. "Intellect said it has no objection to the use of open-source licences as such, but is strongly opposed to the use of the GPL. The group argued that the GPL's conditions would prevent the government from profiting from its software, and could estrange proprietary software companies. "When the Government decides to develop software using a restrictive licensing base, such as the GNU GPL, (it) should be aware that this would prevent it from deriving commercial gain from any subsequent derivative programs and prevent or severely limit the opportunities to work with commercial companies on such projects," Intellect said in the response paper." (Thanks to Alastair Stevens)

(Log in to post comments)

Industry group urges government to think twice on open source (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 19, 2003 20:16 UTC (Thu) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link]

"...and you can fool some of the people all of the time...."

Industry group urges government to think twice on open source (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 19, 2003 21:45 UTC (Thu) by DaveK (subscriber, #2531) [Link]

Governments aren't supposed to be in the business of making a profit.

Profits can be used to fund public services, invest in public projects etc.

Alternatively they can be used to fund tax cuts without appearing to cut public spending ... or simply embezzled!

Industry group urges government to think twice on open source (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 19, 2003 22:46 UTC (Thu) by torsten (guest, #4137) [Link]

"Governments aren't supposed to be in the business of making a profit.

And what are my taxes? A loss?

To be fair, the government will always have unfair advantage over commerce, because commerce is regulated by government. I still don't believe that people should be able to take tax-payer funded work and commercialize it, without contributing back to the people, or to primarily benefit just themselves.

GPL prevents commercial use of software?

Posted Jun 19, 2003 20:03 UTC (Thu) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

Wow, somebody better tell Red Hat, SuSE, IBM, HP, and many others about this! It'll come as a big shock, I'm sure. "Hey, you know you can't make a profit off of that." "But...uhh...we've been DOING it...legally..." "Yes, but it's simply not possible." "OH!" *profits vanish in a puff of logic*

Riiiiight.

Anyway, since when are governments supposed to make profits off of things?

GPL prevents commercial use of software?

Posted Jun 19, 2003 20:07 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link]

>Anyway, since when are governments supposed to make profits off of things?

Didn't you know profit is the only way anything has value? If something doesn't enable moneymaking, it is either 'legacy' or 'terrorist'. Come on, get up with the times, everybody knows that.

...

;-)

Re: Profiting

Posted Jun 19, 2003 20:18 UTC (Thu) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link]

Sadly some of those companies are part of this industry group.

Industry group urges government to think twice on open source (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 19, 2003 21:23 UTC (Thu) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

Well,... thats the cross Linux/Open-source has to bear!
Because it inerently has a diferent kind of marketing it is more expose to "propaganda" attacks,... but on the other hand it's much more attractive to more well informed users, what makes it much more dificult to dismiss.
IN THE END WHAT COUNTS IS GAINNING GROUND!,... , and that is what is making the legacy IT "expertize" in panic.

Industry group urges government to think twice on open source (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 20, 2003 0:14 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

"When the Government decides to develop software using a restrictive licensing base, such as the GNU GPL, (it) should be aware that this would prevent it from deriving commercial gain from any subsequent derivative programs"

How does it do that? I've released code I've written under the GPL, and I've also made money selling commercial rights to exactly the same software. Considering that I wasn't even trying to sell it, I got quite a good return on my development costs.

I hope the MPs can see through this obvious FUD.

Industry group urges government to think twice on open source (ZDNet)

Posted Jun 20, 2003 0:18 UTC (Fri) by petegn (guest, #847) [Link]

And another thing if our Government (UK) takes any notice of the Intellect group
then they need very rapidily to be on the out the door after all they use OUR
money to purchase software and i for one object to paying the likes of M$ for
corrupt inept and most likley 50% lifted code software..

Sorry M$ but the truth often hurts and the fact is by concealing code you are
inviting increasing ammounts of M$ Knocking wich can only be a good thing ..

Pete .

Ridicule and sarcasm are not constructive responses

Posted Jun 20, 2003 18:27 UTC (Fri) by Wills (guest, #1813) [Link]

Dear contributors,

Please explain why and how are any, or all, of the points the Intellect Group raised wrong.

I'd like to see thoughtfully written, well-reasoned arguments on each point. For example, in what ways may the GPL co-exist or not co-exist with commercial exploitation. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the government using multiple simultaneous licenses for each item of open-source government software such that the GPL is but one of several alternative open-source licenses which developers, whether commercial organisations or individuals, could choose from. Please do not use ridicule and sarcasm because these are not valid counter-arguments and just alienate the very people in government -- and elsewhere -- whom you apparently hope to persuade of your case.

Constructive response

Posted Jun 20, 2003 21:50 UTC (Fri) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link]

Okay, challenge taken.

There are two issues here. One is that many of us believe that the GPL is good. Specifically here, it keeps government-sponsored works and their derivatives permanently in the public domain, removing the opportunity for corporations to seal derivative works in proprietary licenses. This promotes the public good by ensuring maintainability and interoperability into the indefinite future, which is essential to public administration, and which is impossible with proprietary-licensed binary-distributed software. This is why the overwhelming majority of Freshmeat and SourceForge projects are GPL. But GPL-supporting arguments abound, it's not hard to find them.

The second, more important issue is the specificity of the attack on the GPL. To quote from the article: "In particular, Intellect recommended that the government drop the GNU General Public License (GPL), the licence upon which the GNU/Linux operating system is based, from its list of acceptable default licences for government-funded software, and steer clear of the GPL generally." This is the anthithesis of your suggestion that "the GPL is but one of several alternative open-source licenses which developers, whether commercial organisations or individuals, could choose from".

So why does "Intellect" urge the government to not fund open-source software, and GPL software in particular?

The answer is that the members of "Intellect" seek to socialize the costs of software development, and privatize the profits, as others have said in talkbacks here. Taking taxpayer-funded software and locking it up for corporate profit needs to be discouraged, not encouraged, and it is astounding that the members of this group state this purpose openly and expect to be supported in furthering this goal -- and very often do receive such support!

<slightly-off-topic>Indeed, one of the greatest legal crimes of our time is taking government-sponsored medical research results and patenting them to create private monopolies on the power to save lives and ease suffering, driving up health care costs and biotech corporate profits, while governments race to keep pumping more research money into pharmaceutical shareholders' profits. This software practice is a less extreme form of the same thing.</slightly-off-topic>

Unfortunately, money talks, and so the robber barons of the software public domain, like the robber barons of taxpayer-funded medical knowledge, will likely have their say in the corridors of power, in this case by tightening the screws ever further on those who promote technologies and business methods which hurt their bottom lines. But this must be resisted at every turn, and will be particularly strongly resisted by the user-developers of that knowledge who are most directly impacted by the bad policy advocated here. Hence the very strong reaction here at LWN.

Satisfied?