NYC Councilman (and Open Source Developer) Submits Bill Establishing Open Source

NewYorkCountryLawyer (912032) writes "New York City Council Member Ben Kallos (KallosEsq), who also happens to be a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) developer, just introduced legislation to mandate a government preference for FOSS and creating a Civic Commons website to facilitate collaborative purchasing of software. He argues that NYC could save millions of dollars with the Free and Open Source Software Preferences Act 2014, pointing out that the city currently has a $67 million Microsoft ELA. Kallos said: 'It is time for government to modernize and start appreciating the same cost savings as everyone else.'"

Re:This is bullshit.

[Githaron]

I would argue that having any government move to open source is good for everyone. I don't know if it will be cheaper but I do think it will like give the people more bang for their buck. Instead of those dollars going into one person's pockets, they can not only still be used to solve the government's software problems but also provide software libraries and frameworks for other to bulid off of.

Re:I'd be satisfied with...

[oodaloop]

Sure. As long as the same is done with Windows. We went from XP to 7 and every edition of Office with no training. In those cases, we all taught ourselves and each other informally. I taught myself Ubuntu at home, so it can be done. Let's just compare apples to apples.

How About We Make it Mature?

[mx+b]

Open standards is extremely important. I'd hate for all that data to be locked into Microsoft Excel format, or what have you.

While I agree that sometimes the FOSS is buggy or missing features, I do not think in this situation we should let that stop us. In fact, I would love to see NYC (and other cities across the country) agree to sponsor/contract a couple of developers each to work on whatever we need: data formatting and conversion, word processing, accounting, voting software, etc. In this way, while the FOSS is maybe not up to spec today, we can all work together on making it up to spec soon. In this way, we all pool resources, get it done correctly ONCE*, and enjoy the savings and philosophical warm and fuzzies.

(* yes I understand that long term we would probably need to continually hire developers on a contract basis to fix problems that come up, or add new features or support for new operating systems, etc., but generally speaking it would be much less impact on the budget long term -- though I also understand the political pressure currently to cut budgets rather than spend a little extra for a perk down the road.).

QA

[jones_supa]

No, just no. The quality of OSS is too bad. Well, let's not say bad per se, but it varies a lot. What you win in software licensing costs, you lose in fighting all the bugs. Too many of your support calls will be wasting your time with silly glitches [launchpad.net].