No, I don't mean the soap opera antics of the judge's post-trial confession, or who is joining or dropping out of the case. Some fear the new Washington regime will go easier on Redmond, and wonder whether the various states will carry on if the federal prosecution deflates.
It doesn't matter.
The damage that counts is already done. Microsoft has been judged to be an outlaw corporation; what's up for debate now is the nature of the punishment. In its long record of being sued for unfair practices, the company has settled and lost more than it has won. And despite some residual hero worship on the part of some who see ruthless greed and lawlessness as a virtue, the bloom is clearly off this rose.
As for the punishment, if the U.S. and/or state government really want to stick it to Microsoft, they need do nothing to Microsoft. They merely need to adjust their own practices. The worst damage governments can do to Microsoft is to give open source consideration for use in public software projects.
It's plain common sense that if our taxes are going toward one of the many computer projects that aren't secreted under the national defense umbrella, we should have access to the source code of that project. This arrangement offers a number of distinct benefits.
First, open source code offers taxpayers the opportunity to see if they are getting their tax dollar's worth, since shoddy workmanship can be exposed by watchdog groups. Vendors afraid of having their work publicly accessible would shy away from government projects, lessening opportunities for patronage and graft. On the flip side, companies whose work does shine when exposed to the light would be able to enhance their reputations. There would be less opportunity for smoke and mirrors in publicly funded IT.
Next, making government software projects open sourced would provide the same benefits as making any project open sourced. When the code is open, there's less wheel-reinvention because each project can build upon the work of previous projects. In government at any level, how much time and money is wasted by different departments re-commissioning the same database application with some local modifications? Imagine how much duplication, how many tax dollars, could be saved by encouraging code sharing and reuse.
Also, open sourcing public projects allows for a previously unavailable path to citizen participation in government. By making source code available, bugs in the system have substantially more likelihood of being discovered and fixed. As people adapt public projects for personal and commercial use (and why shouldn't they--they paid for it!), they will offer enhancements and suggestions that could advance such projects well beyond the pace of current scenarios.
And lastly, such a move would help seed a new industry of open-source software development shops. In a world where analysts constantly wonder where the money is in open source, development such as I'm describing would increase the viability of such businesses and would encourage conventional shops to consider the merits of open source. Even if such shops charge the same fees as proprietary project vendors, the public policy benefits have value.
I'm not asking for governments to give specific tax funding to open-source projects. All I'm suggesting is that governments, as their ultimate punishment of Microsoft, do what it takes in their own procurement and IT policies to make open availability of source code a desirable feature in future requests for proposals (RFPs) and other software-related tenders.
I've said before that a breakup of Microsoft, in itself, wouldn't necessarily provide a useful punishment. The government doesn't need to impose anything on Microsoft in order the level the playing field, it just needs to change its own practices. Some departments are already making headway, albeit slow. When it opened restrictions on encryption software exports about a year ago, the Department of Commerce gave special favor (read: less paperwork) to software projects that "take into account the 'open source' approach to software development".
In other words, what I'm proposing is merely the acceleration of a process already started. The spread of open source software within their own procurement policies is the best way for governments--at any level--to punish Microsoft and its partners in crime.
Do you think open source should become a part of public IT policy? Tell Evan in the TalkBack below or in the ZDNet Linux Forum. Or write to Evan directly at evan@starnix.com.
