UK Govt Warned: Don't Buy GPL

JPMH writes "ZDNet is reporting that a UK IT industry body backed by Microsoft, IBM, Intel, BAE Systems and other high-tech heavyweights has urged the UK government not to commission open-source software, and particularly not software covered by the General Public License. According to Intellect, which lobbies for about 1,000 UK IT companies, the requirement of open-source licences for software funded by the government could have a negative impact on competition for contracts, the quality of the resulting software and even the confidentiality of government departments. In particular, Intellect recommends 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."

Re:Hard to buy

[sxe_p06]

Don't automatically assume free (as in beer), just because of the GPL license. Remeber, a GPL'd piece of software _can_ be charged for, as long as the source is included or available to all parties.

Re:IBM too?

[mark_lybarger]

while IBM is heavy into the opensource movement, they don't always favor the GPL. their eclipse product is licensed under a CPL which is a BSDish license. allows you to release closed source derivitives. As a result, they're using the GTK 2 library as a foundation for their linux SWT toolkit as oppose to QT/KDE. Sun does the same with their NetBeans product with a similar license, except NetBeans is "pure" java and doesn't rely on system gui calls.

Open Source itself isn't a bad thing, it's the viral nature of the GPL that lots of companies don't like. They like to be able to give a little and still release a "Enterprise" or "Enahnced" version that's closed up tight.

Re:Microsoft, IBM, Intel, BAE Systems

[voodoopriestess]

BAE SYSTEMS [baesystems.com] is a UK company that has a section operating in the US.

BAE SYSTEMS make commercial and military equipment for the UK govenment.

Check your facts!

Sounds about right

[whoisjoe]

Yet another well-formed opinion from those who would save us from ourselves, our own prosperity and our own happiness as a society.

It just amazes me that there are still people who listen to these self-important, avaricious cry-babies who have somehow gotten it into their minds that profits from their current business models (without regard for their viability) are an inalienable right.

Re:I'm confused!

[xeaxes]

But it's really just June, thus making this bad news.

Re:Well, of course. GPL is severely restrictive.

[Taurine]

You're damn right its tax-payers' dollars we're talking about. Whenever the UK government buys software from Microsoft, IBM, Oracle etcetera, they are essentially converting British Pounds Sterling into US Dollars and sending them off to US-owned companies. At least with GPL software its less likely to be spent improving a foreign economy, as we have as much chance to compete here in the UK, what with having access to the source code of this non-proprietary software.

Don't be

[Kjella]

IBM wants to sell their own programs, and reduce the profit of other corporations, it's called competition. So if they can sell Linux + IBM stuff for less (or with higher profit margin) than MS + IBM they will. They tried themselves with OS/2 but couldn't make it happen, so better with "noone" than somebody else.

Off-the-shelf software is becoming a commodity, where you can get your basic OS/office pack from Linux. IBM wants to capitalize on those special use systems that OSS will never make because not enough people are interested in making. Government software may definately be one of them, I'm not talking about your average secretary office pack but real custom made stuff, or at least obscure enough you won't find any decent OSS alternative on Linux, or any alternative at all.

Kjella

Re:Hard to buy

[goofballs]

you are grossly misinformed about the gpl license then; if you wish to keep the *internal* software solutions a secret, you can still use the gpl. there is no requirement to share your modifications to gpl code if you're not redistributing it outside your organization.

Re:understandable (from they 're point of view) ..

[zmooc]

I don't think you have to expect much from the EU. Just this week the juridical department of the europarliament approved the new proposal for allowing software patents (and therefore . The woman responsible for preparing the final decision-making - a british labour member of the europarliament: Arlene McCarty somehow is in a lot of hurry to force this through by 30 june already. I think she has a hidden agenda.

Anyway - all pro-Open Source talk from the EU IMHO is just a lot of nice words and no action while at the same time they really don't understand what they're talking about and give more and more away to big multinationals...

Unfortunately I've only got a link about the news in dutch, but there's a petition to cut this crap over here [eurolinux.org]. If you agree with what it states, please sign it.

ZDNet is not reporting accurately

[LittleStone]

You can read the original Intellect's analysis in here [intellectuk.org].

The ZDNet article misinterprets many things Intellect suggest:
1. Intellect does not suggest OSS licenses are all bad. Only GNU GPL could be problematic for the Government uses (ZDNet's title is so misleading)
2. The "GPL not suitable for secretive government bodies" is also overblown. The Intellect just suggests that if the Government wants to maintain confidential codes, they can't do it under GPL.

All in all it's fair to recommend the Government not going for 1 type of development model/license by default. The only question I have on the Intellect's analysis is that they suggested that businesses can't get back value of their IP under GPL. As far as I understand, GPL does not require distributing their software free (as in beer), nor giving up the right of redistribution (so I can't distribute a piece of GPL software in which the copywrite holder does not grant me the redistribution rights.) In that sense, GPL won't hinder commercial interest in software development as suggested in Intellect's paper, and the whole analysis could falls apart. But I'm not sure I'm correct on the GPL, better have someone more familiar with GPL to point it out.

Grammar Fairy sez: It's a good day to learn!

[GrammarFairy]

"...with GPL software its less likely..."

These two words, it's and its, are one of the trickiest in the English language. Here's a little mnemonic that may help:

Posessive "its" doesn't posess an apostrophe.

Using this little phrase, you can tell that your usage above is a contraction (it is less likely...), and hence should read:

"...with GPL software it's less likely ..."

Magic Grammar Dust for you: .`~.'".,,.'~".,,.".

This is complete B.S.

[ansible]

If a piece of Governement funded software were to be subject to a restrictive license, such as the GNU GPL, commercial companies would often not see a benefit in entering tinto such an agreement because:

1) There is a limited amount of money that could be made from the original development because of the limited opportunity for further revenue.

2) They may not want to make public and available for free use any of their IPR that is employed in the development.

Feh. If in today's economy you've got someone balking at developing FOSS, then you can just find someone else. There are plenty of software companies who are hungry for work. They're not worried about future profits, because they're trying to stay in business today.

This is just B.S. cooked up by our "betters" in the IT industry to try to keep their pockets lined with taxpayer cash.

Re:Nothing Holy about Professional Programmers

[Anonymous Coward]

Not going to say where I work, but I can concur. I write both closed-source and open-source software. Because I know people are going to look at the open-source stuff, I write it much more carefully and it is immensely better designed and bug-free. So I know for a fact that open-source is higher quality.

This is not a joke. This is real. Both the open and closed source packages are large professional segments of operating systems.

Re:GPL license is political

[gammoth]

I just had a quick look at the GPL. I didn't see any assertions that 'all published software should be free.'

It did say something to the effect that, if you want to publish software, you can protect yourself and make sure someone else doesn't profit from your effort by making it 'free.'

Commercial software licenses and BSD licenses also contain political messages, if implied. Isn't it nice to have choice.

Re:Hard to buy

[ray-auch]

It works that way up to a point - but if the government then chooses to share the code with someone else they aren't allowed to restrict that someone else from further sharing the code under the GPL.

If you commision GPL code from another party you could limit their rights by contract (you haven't distributed the code to them under the GPL, they have distributed it to you).

If you bring someone in as a contractor to do work for hire on the code then you may not have "distributed" the code outside of your organisation - so they might not have rights to it under GPL.

If you want another organisation to work on the code you have to distribute it to them under GPL, which would seem to mean that you can't place further restrictions (like NDA, classified etc.) on them that would prevent them distributing the code further.

GPL doesn't prevent you keeping things secret. It does prevent you doing a limited distribution and requiring the recipients to keep things secret. Unfortunately that is exactly what most military stuff needs - "secret" classification doesn't mean you can't tell anyone, it means you can't tell anyone who hasn't got the right clearance (which means they can't tell...).

Re:Its a bitch

[Alex]

Look at the NHS - a £6 billion budget for a nationwide system to unify hospitals. £6 billion!? The institution employs 250,000... even giving everybody a machine at £400 each you're talking little more than £100 million. Networking... decent servers and software... where the hell do they spend £6 billion? On outsourcing it to probably 13 or 14 different operators.

Software probably, its not like Microsoft HealthService 2003 ships as part of office.

Integrating 100's of information sources and making them securely/reliably available to all the others can't have been cheap.

Unifying hospitals is a bit more than actually wireing them together, in fact thats barely the start.

Alex