From a Singapore Angle

Han of Wannabe Lawyer (also on Singapore Ink) links to an interesting article (registration required) in which an Australian Mr Robertson of De Bortoli (based in based in Griffith, NSW) says that he "doesn’t understand why his peers elsewhere choose to be locked in to Microsoft's strategy."

"I'm staggered and close to offended that some businesses choose the risk of vendor lock-in, and I'm staggered by the timidity of some IT managers," he says.

Thanks to Mr. Robertson, De Bortoli uses the free software productivity suite OpenOffice "for tasks such as word processing after reading open standards studies from around the world." The advantage of using open source software is not just about cost. Rather, software such as Firefox, OpenOffice have shown much more commitment to standards (rather than to products), which in turn "reduces the leverage that vendors have over customers."

Microsoft, on the other hand, "has shown an antipathy to web standards, because in the view of many they provide an alternative to the Windows desktop - Microsoft’s core business." All this is quite true, well, at least he's preaching to the choir as far as this reader is concern (For more about Wine Maker De Bortoli's switch to open source, see this; for an extensive comparison of the pros and cons of using OpenOffice as opposed to Microsoft Office suite, see this; and Linux vs. Windows, see this.)

The punchline for Wannabe Lawyer, however, is not about the business world. He says:

The really strange thing about our Gahmen is, for a bunch of people so paranoid of losing control, they’re willing to subject their technological infrastructure to the dominion of M$. Sometimes they’re just so unfathomable.

I'll let the relevant authorities do the justifying of the government's decisions, so what follows is purely a layman's external point of view observation.

First, the Singapore government does not use Microsoft Office exclusively. Just this past October, MINDEF has installed OpenOffice on some 5,000 of the 20,000 PCs it operates. There's also talk about switching to Linux for the operating system, though the last I heard about it, it's still at the talk stage (see this and this). A couple of months before that, National Library Board (NLB) made the switch from Microsoft to Linux (see this). So, in a nutshell, it's not really true that the Singapore government is somehow "willing to subject [its] technological infrastructure to the dominion of M[icrosoft]." If there is a complaint, perhaps it's that its not moving fast enough. (Aside, see this site for news items related to moves to open source by governments and major organisations.)

Second, But that is hardly unique to Singapore. No government bureaucracy can ever move as quickly as some small private startup, no matter how liberal the country, or how decentralised the decision making. This is so especially if the existing solutions are not exactly totally bad. Existing licencing arrangements have to run out, the cost of upgrading to some new iteration of Windows Server or whatever weighted against migration to a new system, complete with new maintanence arrangement, retraining of personnel, etc., etc. There's all sorts of reasons to expect the various government agencies to come to appreciate the advantage that open source offers, but there's also all sorts of reasons not to expect them to be able to make full measure of those advantages suddently or quickly. Even the MINDEF move followed a pilot project in which OpenOffice we installed on 200 PCs earlier last year.

Third--and this refers more to the comments left in Wannabe Lawyer's post rather than the post itself--it's premature to draw conclusions about 'culture' of organisations that use Linux or stuck to Microsoft. One reader left this comment:

...the gahmen is comfortable with Microsoft’s way of doing things precisely because they are both hierarchical institutions used to having its way in their respective ball games.

Linux, on the other hand, displaying more egalitarian tendencies (with its thousands of distros, and all that), does seem to have more political identification with anarchist or even socialist organizations. It was borne not as a corporate product, but Torvald’s hobby - and shared worldwide with other enthusiasts. Surely the gahmen can’t afford to spread the idea that anybody but the elite is fit to lead, right?

Han responded with a more nuanced view:

I would in fact argue that FOSS is not socialist, but libertarian. Even in FOSS projects, there IS an elite. Surely you would say Linus himself, and Alan Cox, and the various code gurus are elites.

The real question is how did they become elites. I would argue that the meritocracy that our Government promotes is a false one. The truest meritocracy I have ever seen is the Linux project. The best coders come out tops...

Now Han's observations about the meritocratic nature of open source is quite persuasive. The question is whether larger conclusions about the culture of the users can be inferred. This is where I would be much more hesitant. Let me be clear--it's the connection that I'm more suspicious of, not the claim that the PAP-led government is often (comparatively) paternalistic and had been even authoritarian at times (though even that is slowly but surely changing). But what what has this got to do with the software they use? At the end of the day, most users in big organisations are exactly that--users. They are not expected to (nor should they be allowed to) fiddle with the codes. That's the job of the people who maintain the servers.

Any tyrant of despot could well purchase the latest Red Hat or some other iteration of Linux, pay a few geeks generously (or have their families held hostage) to have it installed for their Ministry of Public Behavior, and run a tight shop on that basis. On the other hand, the most meritocratic, creative, anarchistic, whatever PC gaming software start-up may stick with Windows and churn out dazzling games--because that's where the money is.

On a related note: the mainland Chinese government made a big deal about using Linux, but so far, it had not really created a Linux boom; at least, not of the right kind. The reason: lack of respect across the board for copyright laws anyway. The outcome is ironic, to say the least:

With price a non-issue, businesses and consumers want an operating system that will run the software they need for work or play. For that reason, the OS of choice in China is Windows. Pirated copies of simplified Chinese XP are cheap and generally reliable (as reliable as Windows can be), as are Office, Age of Empires, and a host of other applications. Played any good Linux games lately? Of course not. Found an open-source word processing software that works well with Word? Didn't think so.

When China announced that it would migrate government departments to Linux, many expected a Linux boom. But the country still lacks a sufficient number of technicians who can work on open-source systems. The money is in maintaining Windows-based systems, and in China, you go where the money is. (From here)

This is not to say that Linux has less of a future in China. In fact, the PRC government is still very much committed to encouraging the development of Linux based systems for China--but I'll wager that it's not because they like the anarchistic or meritocratic nature of open source, but at least partly because they desire not to be at the mercy of the international (or American) intellectual property-rights regime.