Dr. Dobb's Journal June 2001
A month or so ago, Microsoft's Jim Allchin put a bunch of bees in a lot of bonnets when he equated open-source software with un-American activities. Back in the 1950s, that would have meant Tim O'Reilly and Richard Stallman in leg-irons before a Joe McCarthy Congressional committee. In today's more enlightened society, however,...well, Congressional committee rooms have more comfortable chairs.
To recap: What Allchin said was "I'm an American; I believe in the American way. I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policymakers to understand the threat." In fact, Allchin could have saved himself a lot of trouble because he was preaching to the choir — governments at every level in the U.S. have no desire to encourage open-source software.
Take property tax valuations, for instance. For the most part, homeowners are led to believe that property valuations are based on the selling price of comparable homes in the neighborhood. But like everything else, there's software involved. And more often than not, this software is developed by Cole-Layer-Trumble (http://www.cltco.com/). CLT licenses its software to state and county auditors, treasurers, assessors, recorders, and the like, for maintaining property descriptions, establishing values, administering exemptions, calculating taxes, producing tax bills, and collecting property taxes. Legacy CLT software is written in Cobol or RPG-2, depending on the platform, while newer systems run on Oracle, PCs, and mobile pen-based systems. As a developer, CLT simply licenses its source code to clients. Whether the source code is public information is determined by the licensee. CLT has no problem with the licensee making the source available for public inspection.
To see how this open attitude measures up in the real world, I randomly selected the state of Kansas as a typical CLT licensee. Like most states, Kansas subscribes to the premise that property taxation shall be "fair and equitable," and to ensure fairness, Kansas requires that property taxation practices be accessible for public scrutiny. This "public scrutiny" requirement is in line with the Kansas Open Records Act (http://www.ink.org/public/ksag/contents/meetings/kora-brochure.htm), which lets citizens "inspect and obtain copies of public records which are not exempted from disclosure by a specific law." Exemptions include records about personnel, medical treatment, notes and preliminary drafts, criminal investigations, and the like.
With this information in hand, I approached the Property Valuation Department (PVD) of the Kansas Division of Revenue, and asked the departmental director if Kansas citizens have open access to the CLT source code that computes their taxes. His answer was short, but not necessarily sweet: "Not through me they won't." Why not? Because, he said, "CLT doesn't allow it." I pointed out CLT leaves that decision up to the licensee, then asked if this position was counter to the Kansas Open Records Act. He felt it wasn't, since source code isn't subject to the Act — a point that seemed key to the entire issue.
At the director's suggestion, I talked to the state's chief information officer. According to him, source code in Kansas — as in most other states — is exempt from the Open Records Act as a matter of law and policy. Keeping mission-critical source code (such as tax-computation programs) secret is viewed as a security issue and required by the audit community. To this end, state laws and policies (http://da.state.ks.us/itec/ITECITPolicyMain.htm#Policy 4220) clearly prevent open disclosure. Statute K.S.A. 45-221(A)(16) states "The following categories of public records are not required to be disclosed: Software programs for electronic data processing and documentation thereof, but each public agency shall maintain a register, open to the public..." (http://www.ink.org/public/ksag/contents/meetings/kora.htm). Ironically, Kansas does officially recognize that open-source software exists, acknowledging that there may be cases where the state may want to use it: "Without access to source code, state entities are more dependent on software vendors to maintain the means to access their electronic records. Having access to the source code allows the entity using the software to contribute to its further development and more easily develop other software that interacts with it. [One way] state entities can ensure access to source code [is to] make use of open-source software (OSS). OSS is software for which the source code is freely and publicly available..." (http://da.state.ks.us/itec/TechArchPt6ver80.pdf).
Perhaps this is the open-source encouragement Allchin was referring to. However, considering all of the policies, laws, agencies, and licensing issues involved, it's hard to picture a scenario in which open-source software could gain a significant foothold in the U.S. government sector (unlike Mexico City's recent decision regarding standardizing on Linux; see News & Views, page 18).
Like I said, it's too bad Allchin didn't realize this before flapping his trap. He would have known that his war may already have been won without any battles being fought. Open source is here to stay. Open government has a ways to go.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief
jerickson@ddj.com