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Good Morning, Chairperson Brewer and members of the Council. I am Tony Stanco, Director of the Center of Open Source & Government, and Associate Director of the Cyber Security Policy and Research Institute at The George Washington University.

It is a special pleasure to appear before you to speak on Open Source procurement policies. This is a very timely topic being looked at by a number of governments around the world. Governments ranging from Texas and Oregon to Peru, India, China, U.K., Germany, France and the U.S. Federal government are all seriously analyzing Open Source procurement policies. As I am sure you are aware, or you will shortly find out, this is a very politicized issue with multi-billion dollar companies and their non-profit associates actively trying to disparage the Open Source model. The Open Source side doesn't have the money to hire lobbyists and salesmen to constantly knock on the doors of government officials to give their side of the story. So, opportunities like this where both sides are allowed to speak openly and equally are very welcome.

One question that is seldom asked is, "How can Open Source possibly be giving multi-billion dollar companies so much competition that they feel they need to actively dissuade government officials from even thinking of using Open Source software?" This is not an idle question. Open Source doesn't have lobbyists or marketers or ad men to promote its software. So, to say that governments shouldn't have rules to consider Open Source software, as Open Source opponents often do, takes away the only avenue that Open Source has to really reach government. The Open Source sales model is fundamentally "pull" model, where enlightened procurement officers need to know enough to ask about Open Source in the first place. There is no "push" model of sales in Open Source like that employed by the multi-billion dollar companies with their legions of salesmen, ad men, and lobbyists. In fact, the average large software company is 1/3 software developers, and 2/3 salesmen, marketers, management, apologists, and lawyers. So, a very apt question is -- if their software is so good and they have an extra 2 people for every one developer pushing it, why is it that they try so hard to impede government officials from making side-by-side comparisons? You would think they would be anxious to have procurement rules that require such comparisons so that they can show how much better their very expense software is.

But they don't do that. Instead, they descend on any government official who tries to introduce a law or regulation that requires procurement officers to "consider using Open Source software when acquiring new software," as the Oregon House bill merely does.

This is a very subtle silencing of Open Source. It is supremely disingenuous, and violates the fundamental principle of a free market: fully informed decision-making. Why shouldn't procurement officers be asked to consider Open Source software? In fact, having such rules is only doing what The President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) recommended should be done to level the playing field. In its October 2000 Report to the President on "Developing Open Source Software to Advance High End Computing," the committee said, "a 'level playing field' must be created within the government procurement process to facilitate Open Source development." Notice the use of the word "must" in that recommendation.

At this point, I want to leave the procedural fairness issues of having Open Source considered equally by procurement officers, and move on to what I see as the substantive issues that make Open Source software considerably better than traditional proprietary software for government use. I will cover these under the headings of 1. Democratic Implications, 2. Privacy, 3. Cost, 4. Research and Development/Technology Transfer, 5. Education, 6. Job Creation, and 7. Security.

Democratic Implications

Governments are special entities and their functions and operations can be at odds with proprietary software applications that are developed for multiple purposes. Governments have special obligations to protect the integrity, confidentiality and accessibility of public information throughout time like no other entity in society. Therefore, storing and retrieving government data through secret and proprietary data formats tied to a single provider is especially problematic, since the usability, maintenance and permanence of government data should not depend on the goodwill or financial viability of commercial suppliers.

Furthermore, citizens have a right to transparency in public acts, which may be hampered by secret, proprietary software. A clear example of this is e-voting software. I expect no one would seriously defend the right of proprietary software companies to prevent political candidates from inspecting the software that tallies the votes in elections. There are many other public acts that fall into the same category. So many, in fact, that the onus should rightly be placed on companies to justify the use of proprietary software in purely governmental settings.

Privacy

There is a constitutional right to privacy, and it is incumbent on government to set rules to protect the privacy of its citizens. Software that may transmit private data to, or allow control and modification of computer systems by, third parties without the explicit consent of the user is a violation of the citizen's right to privacy. It is disingenuous to argue, as Open Source opponents often do, that the market will sufficiently protect the rights of citizens in these circumstances. Software follows the principle of "network effects" where, after a certain tipping point, all consumers lose their freedom of choice and are herded into using the same product for the sake of interoperability. The existence of monopoly situations in software also work to restrict freedom of choice, further limiting the protective effects of a purely market-based solution. As a result, government intervention is appropriate to protect the privacy rights of its citizens.

Cost

On Tuesday, April 15, 2003 Mayor Bloomberg, facing a budget gap of $3.4 billion, warned that the city may have to lay off up to 10,000 city employees on top of the 4,500 previously announced job cuts. This at a time when the City of New York spends almost $750 million each year on information technology.

It is an anomaly that software prices are increasing during the worst IT slump in decades, but it is happening, because with proprietary software there are negative network effects and powerful monopolies that can extract ever-increasing monopoly rents even as many others are facing severe economic distress.

Could software costs be cut, instead of government jobs, in an effort to reduce the deficit? It is a question that should at least be investigated. Replacing some proprietary software products with free, Open Source counterparts would obviously eliminate the licensing costs of those products. There are reports from people who testified at the Oregon Open Source hearing that some school districts saved so much money by using Open Source software that they could afford to hire additional teachers.

Google and Amazon serve as examples of leading IT companies that saved money in the real world with Open Source software. Why couldn't government do the same thing?

Google is powered by over 10,000 Linux servers and its founder said that Linux was chosen because it "offers the best price-for-performance ratio."

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (where I happened to work for almost 6 years as a securities attorney before joining George Washington University), Amazon said it was able to cut technology expenses by about 25 percent, from $71 million to $54 million. The reduction was attributed to a large degree to Amazon's migration to a Linux-based technology platform that utilizes a less-costly technology infrastructure.

Research and Development/Technology Transfer

The Open Source method is analogous to the scientific method, where researchers share information and results, and are not hampered by having to constantly "reinvent the wheel." Additionally, Open Source researchers do not have to deal with expensive and restrictive licensing terms, which arbitrarily preclude the involvement of talented people. This creates a very low threshold to get into the research and development of projects, allowing smaller schools and even industrious individuals to participate.

It is acknowledged within the R & D community that non-Open licenses can hinder technology transfer, because the license holder controls what gets done with the research. Sometimes, those licenses preclude sharing or even showing others the results of the research. Other times, the license holder decides not to implement the R & D themselves , and refuses to let anyone else to do so, either. As a result, the research gets buried, forgotten and never used. This doesn't happen with Open Source.

Education

Open Source is a superior way to educate the next generation of IT professionals. With Open Source, the developers see and study the actual code running real world systems, rather than working with stripped-down "toys" designed merely for educational purposes. Many developers have recounted that they learn best by trying and watching what happens in the program as it runs. This should not be surprising at all, since this was how developers learned the craft before the 1980s when the closed software industry arose. Open Source is just returning software to its free and open roots.

Also, it should be noted that Open Source software development is known to be more modular and more readily understandable from its very structure. It is developed in this organized way, because otherwise people would not be able to contribute effectively to the code base, since oftentimes there is no documentation but the code itself to study. As a result, self-education by looking at the code is an important feature of Open Source that is "baked-in" to the development model itself. For the lawyers in the audience this is similar to the "case method" of learning law, where struggling with real cases is generally expected to create better lawyers. The theory is that in studying the hard cases, there is a transcendent moment when the veil of utter confusion over most first year students is lifted as the patterns and logic of the cases suddenly, magically emerges. It is said that young software developers experience the same sort of thing in studying the complexity of Open Source programs and are, thereby, made better developers for enduring that challenge.

It should also be noted that Open Source has marvelous outreach programs run by community groups in most cities around the world. It is very common for teenagers, IT students and experienced professionals to attend free Open Source events to share ideas, software and programming skills. There are a number of these groups in New York City, which itself has a large and vibrant Open Source community.

Job Creation

The business model for Open Source software is that of a specialized services industry, similar to law, medicine or engineering. As a result, moving government systems to Open Source software means that there will be more local, high-paying IT jobs for integrators and consultants in New York City's own Silicon Alley. Furthermore, using government procurement to help create New York-based Open Source consulting jobs has a spin-off economic multiplier effect that will benefit many other New York residents, too. Software dollars that are kept in New York, and not paid to out-of-state companies, will obviously increase the city's and state's tax base.

Security

The open secret in the defense and intelligence communities around the world is that Open Source is the preferred software for secure systems. These groups don't trust software that they can't study and compile themselves, because of concerns over bugs and "spyware," and therefore would rather use Open Source software for their sensitive and classified systems.

Quoting from the Executive Summary of the January 2003 Mitre Report called the "Use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in the U.S. Department of Defense":

"The main conclusion of the analysis was that FOSS plays a more critical role in the DoD than has generally been recognized. FOSS applications are most important in four broad areas: Infrastructure Support, Software Development, Security, and Research. One unexpected result was the degree to which Security depends on FOSS. Banning FOSS would remove certain types of Infrastructure components that currently help support network security. It would also limit DoD access to, and overall expertise in, the use of powerful FOSS analysis and detection applications that hostile groups could use to help stage cyberattacks. Finally, it would remove the demonstrated ability of FOSS applications to be updated rapidly in response to new types of cyberattack. Taken together, these factors imply that banning FOSS would have immediate, broad, and strongly negative impacts on the ability of many sensitive and security-focused DoD groups to defend against cyberattack."

This concludes my testimony today. I would be pleased to respond to any questions you may have.

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