InfoTech: how governments embed software in the lives of citizens

Do you use Linux? If so, don't bother trying to log onto the "webinar" being run by US Treasury department FinCEN. FinCEN's remit is to collect data relating to transactions made in cash and to collect information from those who suspect money laundering.

To help it, it has an on-line filing system to which many businesses, ranging from banks to casinos, subscribe.

Yesterday, FinCEN announced changes to its e-filing system and said that it would run an on-line meeting to explain the changes and how to implement them.

That's good.

Then it said "PC-based attendees will require: Windows® 7, Vista, XP, 2003 Server or 2000Macintosh®-based attendees will require: Mac OS® X 10.4.11 (Tiger®) or newer"

That's bad.

Governments are supposed to encourage competition. After all, the pass laws to detect and deter monopolies. But the US government does not make much money out of alternative operating systems - including Linux upon which Mac OS X is based.

The UK government adopts a similar approach: HM Treasury issued terrorism sanctions related documents in PDF format - and exclusively recommends Adobe's Acrobat Reader as the software to open its documents. The HMT could use an open format (indeed, the use of PDF is a hindrance to those who need the information contained in the documents).

In Malaysia, a stated intention by the former Prime Minister Mahathir to migrate all government departments to open source computing has failed to gain traction: any document submitted in OpenOffice.Org format is rejected and a request made for it to be resubmitted in Microsoft Office format.

Around the world, governments are not only failing to reduce their operating costs by migrating to open source products which easily meet the requirements of their staff but are also enforcing their choices on a population that has, despite the dominance of a small number of players, shown a willingness to move away from proprietary and unnecessarily costly software.

The irony is that, according to research from the Business Software Alliance (an industry group made up of large companies which has somehow secured the use of the police and other enforcement agencies to enforce copyright law in many countries - something authors and musicians can never hope to achieve) says that as many as half the world's PCs have some unlawful software on them.

It also claims that this results in losses to the software industry of some USD59,000 million.

This makes an illogical (but headline grabbing) assumption that this massive amount of money would immediately flow into the accounts of those large corporations.

But it is not so: in Thailand, as recently as five years ago, the nascent PC industry resulted in no long history of installation of Microsoft product: the operating system of choice was reported to be Linux and with it the various forms of open source applications that do the jobs that most people need. Microsoft responded with a heavily slashed product price list and began to buy market share. It adopted a similar tactic in China in the late 1990s - and was part of the lobbying group that persuaded the then government in Hong Kong to make it illegal to buy genuine copies of their software in China and sell them in Hong Kong, undercutting the inflated price charged in the territory.

Governments should not be promoting - at least not exclusively - commercial software. For the vast majority of people in the developing world, it's simply not an affordable option. It's almost a decade since our sister publication BankingInsuranceSecurities.Com (then known as World Money Laundering Report Online) reported "In Malaysia, according to one TV company, only 3% of the population earn more than RM3,000 per month - gross. A ringget is worth about GBP0.18. With a new PC, Windows 2000 costs RM750; Adobe Acrobat (when we eventually found it) cost RM950. The price of equipping a workstation with a full set of graphics and business software can easily cost more than six months' salary for a programmer."

The situation has not greatly improved: indeed, as PC manufacturers turn their gizmos into fashion items, components being obsolete within a couple of years so one failed component means buying a new PC, the life cycle of software is similarly accelerated.

With Microsoft telling its channel sales that it needs to to more to get Windows XP users to upgrade to Windows 7 ahead of the next upgrade to the imminent Windows 8, and the orphaning of earlier versions for security updates, the policy is clear.

But OpenSource software has no similar pressures (except that, they are put under pressure to keep producing new versions for the sole reason that the dominant players change their product and therefore interchange standards must be addressed).

It's time that governments began to actively promote the use of open source operating systems and applications - and the place to begin is with their own websites.

It is amazing how many government websites run ASP and function best with the non-standard Internet Explorer. When 80% of the world's websites run Linux, the percentage of government sites still locked into Microsoft is significantly out of proportion.

Taxpayers are disadvantaged, as are business and other users who are aware of the alternatives. Those who are not industry savvy are soft sold the idea that only the big companies are good enough to deal with.

That's a fiction and governments really should know better.