Hi all,
Spoke to the Commerce Commission and (Alex at) the Gov't Ombudsman's
office this morning regarding the implicit mandate to use proprietary
software standards in many aspects of private sector-gov't interaction.
To keep you in the loop, at the recommendation of the Ombudsman's
office, I sent the following just now to the CE of MBIE (responsible for
GETS and the all-of-gov't software agreement with MS), David Smol:
Hello David,
My name is Dave Lane, and I'm writing to you as the president of the New
Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS - https://nzoss.org.nz). I am also a
20 year veteran of the IT profession and a NZ business owner.
I am a strong proponent of (vendor-neutral, royalty free) open standards
for technologies as a way of achieving consistency, compatibility,
competition (and with it lower costs), and both commercial and consumer
confidence in almost every area of business and commerce.
I am contacting you because I'm concerned about a major anomaly in this
pervasive use of open standards: the NZ government makes extensive,
almost exclusive use of software which imposes its own proprietary
standards on all files and documents created, to the exclusion of any
competing software. I'm especially concerned because
a) open standards exist and are viable (the UK has mandated their
adoption -
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/open-document-formats-selected-to-meet-user-needs),
and
b) the NZ gov't widespread use of those proprietary standards creates an
implicit requirement on private industry and the citizens of NZ to also
use that proprietary software to the exclusion of other equally suitable
software if they want to communicate/collaborate with gov't.
In this case, I'm talking about the ubiquitous use of the Microsoft
Corporation's MS Office software (and Office 365, etc.) which, by
default (and this default is never changed in practise) creates files
which are non-compliant with any open standard and are therefore
proprietary.
The website http://openstandards.nz describes the problem in more
detail. This page, http://openstandards.nz/open-standards-presentation -
which is an online version of a presentation I wrote - shows that the
majority of GETS tenders - although they provide some explanatory
documentation in open standard formats like PDF - provide crucial
documents like Response Templates and Descriptions of Requirements - in
proprietary Microsoft Office formats. This implicitly requires any
private organisation who wants to respond to do so using MS Office
(because no other software can realistically provide full compatibility
with MS' unilaterally controlled proprietary formats).
So, the gov't agencies writing these RFPs are implicitly mandating the
use of MS' proprietary software by anyone in the private sector wanting
to provide services to government. To my mind, this is amounts to the
government blocking competition in the software used by private industry.
Similar issues exist for private citizens who must often use MS Office
document templates provided by government websites, which are
increasingly the only practical way for them to interact with government
agencies.
Finally, last week, the NZ government trumpeted (
http://www.computerworld.co.nz/article/579771/nz-govt-extends-microsoft-licensing-agreement-by-three-years/)
that it had signing a 3 year extension of the Microsoft
all-of-government agreement, and claimed to achieve a substantial
"savings" in the process.
Given that no other software can legitimately claim to reliably read and
write the proprietary Microsoft formats created by MS Office, I don't
believe the NZ gov't had any *alternative* but to sign up to another
all-of-gov't agreement. That also means that the NZ gov't was in a
hopelessly weak bargaining position. I believe that any claims of
"savings" are spurious and misleading, because savings implies "less
than the alternatives".
Ultimately, the NZ government's pervasive (but perhaps unwitting)
adoption of proprietary file formats such as those created by MS Office
means that we have given vendors like the Microsoft Corporation a
monopoly on supplying software to the NZ government. Given that true
open standards exist (and have already been made mandatory by the UK
government) I think that is against the best interest of the NZ
government, and the taxpayer and private industry who must interact with
the government using digital files, for the status quo to continue.
I would like you, as the CE of MBIE, to let me know if you think this
current situation is acceptable. If so, I would like justification for
that position. If not, I would like to know what MBIE will do to break
the monopoly control of software via proprietary formats.
The members of the NZOSS and I want to see a "level playing field" in
software procurement by the NZ government, with a *mandate on compliance
with vendor neutral, royalty free open standards" to ensure that there
is real competition in the marketplace and that the taxpayers of NZ are
not continuing to pay monopoly rents to overseas corporate software
vendors to be able to have continued access to our own files.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards,
Dave