Cupfighter.net

By Arjen Kamphuis (@ArjenKamphuis)

Arjen started off by explaining why he thinks that software is important. About as important as the first book press. The creation of synthetic life earlier this has reduced the problem of life to a software problem, a very complex software problem, but a software problem non-the-less.

One day, after Arjen noticed that the main Dutch railway website could only be used with Internet Explorer he decided to write the railway and several Dutch politician, he got requested to put in a proposal for a Dutch law pushing open source software as a government policy. Since the Dutch government does 12% of Dutch software spending, they should lead by example. This bill got passed, partly because the day before it got known that Microsoft had a nett. margin of 92% on Windows.

The Netherlands import 7,800,000,000 Euro of software each year. For that kind of money the Dutch government could employ as much programmers as Microsoft who would all be Dutch and paying taxes in the Netherlands.

Using open standards is like using shipping containers. There is no need for specialized transport, shipping or loading procedures.

Essentially you could use open source for almost anything. For commodity applications there are open source alternatives available for almost all programs. For specialized software, software written for a single customer for a specific job, open source just requires that the contract demands that the source is opened up.

Unfortunately, the last war was not fought with the passing of the bill, because while government where switching from Word to OpenOffice, they were also implementing SharePoint as their document management system.

Interoperability does not mean moving everything to the cloud. Does you really want all you government data to be in a cloud run by a company which is based in another country?

The global economic meltdown is actually a positive impulse for open source, even tough the reason may be wrong. “Never waist a good crisis.”

Laws & policies in modern nations are implemented through software and supporting computer systems. Control over these systems is control over the government. Microsoft being able to shut down all government PC’s running windows is now a matter of national security.

In Europe a change is happening. The French gendarme has moved over to open source software and the German government has declared that Open Source software maintenance was cheaper then commercial software.

Slide deck is here: http://bit.ly/bXmb2f

Arjen’s blog is here: http://www.kmphs.com/