Openness Questions Remain For Obama
It remains unclear what technologies or standards President Barack Obama will decide to harness to support his open government initiatives. Obama has on numerous occasions pledged that he will make the government as transparent and open as possible - even going as far as to give his administration deadlines on when certain milestones will be reached and state that his administration "will put government data online in universally accessible formats." Many seem to agree that openness in general is a positive goal, but how to best reach that objective gets foggy.
"Openness" is a general movement, not just related to open source and standards. That said, openness intersects many areas and it doesn't take a big leap to go from discussions about open government to procurement policies for IT based on open standards," wrote IBM Vice President Bob Sutor in a blog post last month. Microsoft CTO Susie Adams agrees there has been a lot of talk about openness as a theme of the new administration and believes Obama "wants to capture an assurance of openness as a way to set direction and vision." In terms of how the goal of openness relates to technology specifically, she said "a true, open government should rely on a "mixed source" blend of technologies -- an approach used around the world.
"That approach would help ensure continued benefit and return on existing IT investments while simultaneously making sure the best tool for a particular job is in place," Adams said, noting that "no one vendor or one software approach will lead to success." But Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy, who told the BBC he has been asked to prepare a paper on open source for the Obama administration, has hailed open source products. "The government ought to mandate open source products based on open source reference implementations to improve security, get higher quality software, lower costs, higher reliability - all the benefits that come with open software," he said.
Michael Wendy, a spokesman for the Computing Technology Industry Association, which includes Microsoft as a member, said there "has been some thought in industry that some of [Obama's] choices and some of his statements would lead one to believe if you work in the industry that he might prefer an open development as opposed to a proprietary development model. His campaign statements witnessed that." "Statements that indicate preference for one technology over the other limit choice for government CIOs and ultimately for the taxpayer," Wendy said. "Choice should be driven by merit and not by software definitional labels."
Marino Marcich of the OpenDocument Format Alliance noted that "ODF is a prime example of an open, universally accessible format that would help put federal government data within easier reach of the public." Companies such as Sun Microsystems, IBM and Google are members of the alliance. Microsoft has an open document format known as Open XML. Outside the United States, some governments have announced a preference for "open standards." These moves have been supported by the ODF Alliance but opposed by some industry groups that don't think the government should be favoring one format over another. -- Winter Casey
Join the Discussion
The National Journal Group has the right (but not the obligation) to monitor the comments and to remove any materials it deems inappropriate.
Comments powered by Disqus