There’s a fair amount of hypocrisy in the open code festival officially opened the other week with the enlightened bill proposed by MK Nehama Ronen.
Ronen, in case you failed to notice, proposed an amendment to the Mandatory Tenders Law obliging government agencies and institutions to buysoftware based on open source code exclusively. Any deviation from this procedure would, under the bill, require approval from the Minister of Finance. What’s more, Minister of Finance Silvan Shalom will not be able to approve exceptions as he sees fit; he will have to justify each and every one, in writing. Anyone in breach of this law, and this is something of a surprise, will be liable to a fine. All this fuss, and just a fine at the end of it? Why not an electric chair, with Sun Microsystems embedded software? The story they are trying to sell us now is that this is all really in aid of bringing the poorer sections of the population into the Internet age. Poor people, they tell us, manage to buy personal computers, which have fallen sharply in price, but struggle to buy software, the price of which refuses to fall because of Microsoft’s monopoly in this area.
I could have presented the positions of each side, put on a UN hat, and let you draw your own conclusions. But why should I? When the Israeli government takes sides, in its recent decision to adopt an “Office”-like open-code package for downloading from the Internet at low prices, who am I to stand out from the herd?
If the pile of socialist nonsensefrom MK Ronen and others sounds familiar, it’s no coincidence. As we all remember, a seemingly interminable legal case on the matter has already been heard, in the US of all places, where government departments still insist for some reason on closed-code products.
Thanks to the anti-trust case, “Microsoft” became a synonym for “monopoly”, preferably “ruthless”, or, even better, “harmful to the public interest”. We all still remember how the US Department of Justice, backed by the prosecutors of nineteen states, exposed in court sensational e-mail messages in which Microsoft’s senior management demanded of the company’s staff that they should smash Netscape, the company’s (former) competitor in Internet browsers.
And so the hostility to Microsoft rolls on, with or without a show trial, and now it winds up at MK Ronen’s door. OK, people of limited means can’t afford an Internet connection, and they should be helped in that respect. Fine. The enlightened state, which of course has never discriminated in favor of the rich at the expense of the poor, will come along and assist anyone it sees as deserving to buy the required software. Why decide on behalf of those citizens which software they should buy? Why exercise positive discrimination in a market ostensibly based on the principle of competition?
Beyond that, there are certain flaws in a vision which mainly consists of creating a large community of users of ersatz “Office” packages or open-code software. Forget for a moment all the anti-monopoly slogans. What we will get is a group of second-class computer users, precisely the situation the state was trying to avoid. Open-code programs generally require far more extensive maintenance than their closed-code counterparts, and there is generally no one around to provide such maintenance. Not to mention the fact that Microsoft,the devil take it, constantly makes sure that there can be no full communication between open-code and closed-code software. And who pays the price? The open-code software users, who, incidentally, are a fairly tiny minority worldwide.
Even if we ignore the users, since in any case no one will ultimately bother about them, the question remains: How can a state, any state, become involved in a battle so fraught with business interests as the battle over open code? Can members of Knesset like Nehama Ronen afford, even indirectly, to promote the interest of companies like Sun, Oracle, and the various Linux providers, whose only advantage over Microsoftlies intheirpathetic underdog look?
In the case of Sun and Oracle, it’s hard even to feel sympathy. These companies have for years been waging a vengeful, ugly, and repellent war against Microsoft. Their founders, Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison, long ago crossed the line into Bill Gates-obsession territory. Even IBM, Microsoft’s massive veteranrival, is not without an interest in the open-code struggle. Microsoft excels at selling products, while IBM leads in service provision. Among other things, open code means soaring expenditure on software services. Bingo for IBM, but what is Nehama Ronen doing in this arena?
The campaign in favor of open code, and this is news to no one, is supported by several countries, chief among them the EU members, but alsoChina. Again, the interests are clear: Europe sides with the local software companies that have become accustomed to losing to Microsoft and running crying to the judges; China feels threatened by any large US concern about to conquer the world and spread capitalist pollution. If Israel wants to take part in this mud-wrestling between vested interests, good luck to her. Justquit theRobin Hood act. He was and remains a thief.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on October 17, 2002