Even though Barack Obama was only just sworn in as President of the United States on Tuesday, his administration already appears to be showing an interest in open source.
Technology — both in application and message — was a big part of the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Now that President Obama has been sworn in, technology appears to still be front and center. Case in point: Co-founder and former CEO of SunMicrosystems, Scott McNealy revealed to the BBC this week that he had been tapped by the Obama administration to write a paper on the benefits to the government of using open source.
There have been no shortage of nods toward the new President’s stance on openness: Blogs especially have been quick to point out his weekly YouTube videos, www.whitehouse.gov’s creative commons license, or the site’s metaphor-rich robot.txt file. But this request of Mr. McNealy sounds like something that could be used to develop a substantial plan of action for government-funded technology. Certainly a more open approach to US technology would be a good thing. To quote Mr. McNealy:
“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.”
So, where might President Obama apply open source? If you look through his technology agenda (which makes no mention of open source), one section that pops out falls under the topic of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs).
Lower Health Care Costs by Investing in Electronic Information Technology Systems:
Use health information technology to lower the cost of health care. Invest $10 billion a year over the next five years to move the U.S. health care system to broad adoption of standards-based electronic health information systems, including electronic health records.
While this sounds promising, there are a host of issues that quickly appear when you start to dig a little deeper into the migration toward EHRs.
So not only would you have to solve all of the problems of security, standards, and existing record scanning just to get started, you would then need to go in and put computers on a lot of desks where there are none.1
That’s not to say that applying open source and open standards to the healthcare industry is impossible and isn’t already gaining traction in some areas. For example, the Veterans Administration clinical information system software (VistA) is open source and, by all accounts, an incredible success: “VistA saves lives and money.”
But even with ready successes like this to point to, President Obama will find the transition to open source difficult. The DoD has been waging a long-term war to have VistA replaced with a proprietary system.
Old habits — particularly in Washington — die hard. But I take the new President at his word when he said in his inauguration speech:
The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works [...] Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.
I think that requesting a paper on open source from Mr. McNealy is a good first step in that direction. So here’s to openness — from the circuitboard to the citizenry– at every level government.
1 You can almost hear Microsoft warming up their usability arguments for Vista/7, can’t you? Oh, and did you know they already had a EHR solution in place?
Comments on "President Obama: Good for Open Source?"
This is just silly.
The concerns raised as to the practicality of transitioning all health records to electronic format are all good and valid. And the skepticism that the government can be “moved” towards anything – openness or anything else – is appreciated.
But statements like McNealy’s: “The government ought to mandate open source products…” scares the hell out of me. Using the tide of Obamamania to “mandate” to the public & government what products they must use is antithetical to the free market system and American capitalism.
It would be way cool to read an article promoting open source and/or Linux on its merits without the obligatory MDS dig (MDS = Microsoft Derangement Syndrome).
I applaud Obama’s desire to move forward with an Open Source mandate because it will save a ton of my money in the form of tax dollars that are being wasted. It will also in one fell swoop break the Microsoft monopoly in a way that no antitrust suit ever has or likely will. The U.S. government is an enormous customer — the largest customer in the world, I’m sure. If it follows the lead of Europe (that already has strong leanings towards open source solutions in many governments, I believe) and goes this way, MS will have two choices:
a) Become open source, in which case it will become trivial to clone it or write faithful fully functional full speed emulators capable of running any Windows software, not just a subset of it more slowly. If they go this route prices will drop like a rock because the days of high margin software/OS sales will be over forever. Linux and other OSOSes will gain ground as MS is no longer able to protect their operating system environment and maintain its unfair advantage in integration with MS authored software. It will put similar stresses on the relatively few non-MS companies selling major software used by the government or government agents. If they overprice their code they will be cloned by a cheaper competitor, period. They’ll have to start selling service, not software, and service is always a competitive market with many ways to get it (including self-service).
b) Try to remain proprietary and survive without the government market or the many corporate markets it influences.
In the case of b), they IMO die (or more likely are forced kicking and screaming into choice a) within five years. They might try to hold out for five years to see if Obama loses the next election and dump a billion dollars into the campaign coffers of whoever runs against him and promises to reverse the decision, but they might be so embattled in just two or three years that they cannot afford to wait. Linux especially would soar.
I’m particularly interested in the EHR/EMR issue, as I’m a consultant for a midsized medical practice that converted (really is still converting) from paper to electronic charts starting roughly 19 months ago. Their base EMR is CLOSED source but the server does run under linux (tomcat+mysql). Alas, all of their CLIENTS are WinXX, and their systems engineers and customer service people are by and large linux-idiots. I had to fix a nasty race condition in their startup scripts myself when we first installed it, for example, and they’ve never heard of e.g RPMs and actual packaging or automated maintenance, so that updating their product on server or workstation is major pain (and hence major expense) instead of transparent.
The EMR itself isn’t bad, but it has various bugs in it that are nearly impossible to get fixed — the usual problem in closed source software and “features” that have the docs pulling out their hair — places where the layout is just stupid, or where they have to click twenty times because of a poor design decision where a single click would do 99% of the time. I WISH that they’d open the source for the EMR and especially the client. I’d have the client cloned for linux in a matter of weeks (saving the practice tens of thousands of dollars a year in maintance cost, some unknowable amount of HIPAA exposure and risk, and the ENORMOUS hassle they now experience with #@^!* Windows on both server and desktop, with its slowness, tendency to leak memory, inability to multitask efficiently, lack of an X-like protocol for remote interfaces. I could move them to a fully diskless fully secure setup that required about thirty minutes of maintenance a month in a single month of work and that NEVER EVER slowed down due to load, where now there are Windows-engendered bottlenecks galore.
I could also fix the EMR code, if I had to learn java to do it. For example, right now it uses no encryption on the primary client server transactions. The only security is from keeping the internal network itself protected inside a VPN. And this is par for the course — the designers of EMRs are, by and large, complete idiots, and the companies that sell them engage in the usual process of doing the least amount of actual development work that results in a product they can sell, and then devoting ten dollars to sales for every dollar they spend on development or support. Even the three people who actually wrote the code and would LIKE to fix it up and improve it are so busy putting out fires caused by its flaws that they never have time to actually do so.
This is an arena that is CRYING OUT for mandated open source and open standards, including the missing security requirements (missing because HIPAA is entirely vague about implementation — it basically says “keep your patient data secure and safe, or else” without ANY REAL GUIDANCE as to how).
Standards at the networking layer, standards at the data layer, standards for all the primary (e.g. insurance/clearninghouse or lab) interfaces would ensure portability of the actual EHR data across vendors. Vendors could then focus on the INTERFACE and its prettiness and usability where they’d be in strong competition with all the other interface vendors as the “lock-in” associated with proprietary back ends and networking and the expense of changing systems would largely disappear.
rgb
“The DoD has been waging a long-term war to have VistA replaced with a proprietary system.”
Gasp! Imagine that. DoD would rather shovel bails of public money at the private sector than use a solution that works and saves money. I will try to recover from my shock.
This article doesn’t seem to understand the intricacies of government procurement. Under DFARS, unless the contractor specifies in the bid that they will be providing proprietary software, the contractor is required to provide the source. I assume that the author is talking about the operating system and not the source code.
To get a true sense of where the Obama administration is going, one only has to look at whitehouse.gov, the face of the President. Ditto for change.gov, which was Obama’s “president-elect” face. For both change.gov and whitehouse.gov, Microsoft servers (IIS 6.0), coupled with Adobe Shockwave and WebTrends tracking is driving the site. The one obvious open source package used, jquery, is being used under the MIT licensing scheme, which means that Obama’s people are not required to provide their modified source to any requester.
When reality happens, the result is rarely what you think it will be.
Open source wont happen.
One of the factors that supports my statement is jobs. Jobs in the closed source world total in the hundreds of thousands. Microsoft’s payroll is in excess of 55,000. Will open source gainfully employ the same numbers?
So, what we want, is open standards. Word files that will be readable by software, 25 years from now, or even 2000 year created files that will be readable 250 years from now.
That means open standards at the least.
Leslie
Look at the type of people he surrounds himself with. Chicago politics move to DC. The corruption will only run deeper and we will be given solutions that cause more problems than they solve. Then the same fools who caused the problem can come to the rescue implementing what they wanted in the first place. Looking to a politician for help gets us into the ultimate shell game.