Efforts to increase the adoption of open source software are being derailed by the efforts of a "loud minority" within the community that have stooped to making personal attacks on those deemed to be enemies, according to one of the open source movement's strongest advocates.
So says Jeff Waugh of open source advocacy group Waugh Partners, fed up after a series of personal attacks directed at the heads of government agencies, including comments directed at Australian Taxation Office CIO Bill Gibson, after he told ZDNet.com.au that his agency's adoption of open source software had been stalled by security concerns.
Some of the public responses to the article labelled Gibson a "bureaucratic parasite" and his concerns "short-sighted".
While Waugh believes the open source model holds better security outcomes than its proprietary equivalent, he equally describes the vitriolic reaction to Gibson's comments as being 'disgraceful' and says they achieve nothing for the industry.
"Bill Gibson's comments simply reflect the concerns that CIOs have," he said. "It is precisely in his job description to ask those questions."
"This kind of language makes it extremely hard for the open source industry to get the appropriate level of consideration in government departments," Waugh continued. "It pushes all the other CIOs the wrong way. None of them will talk about open source because none of them want to get their head bitten off."
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"I can tell you that at the very highest levels of government, there is interest and opportunities that exist for open source," Waugh said. "This doesn't help." Waugh was also disheartened when personal attacks were levelled at Standards Australia's Alistair Tegart over Microsoft's push to have its OOXML format accepted as an ISO standard.
"I suspect that as a result, [Teggart] is becoming deeply cynical about open source," Waugh said. "I'm not saying it would affect his professional judgement, but his job has been made uncomfortable."
Waugh said government IT agencies such as AGIMO (Australian Government Information Management Office) have equally been slammed for not taking enough interest in open source. Waugh insists that AGIMO "have done plenty" with regards to symposiums and open source surveys within government.
"These [comments] are the loudest voices, but they are a minority view in the community," Waugh said. "Very rarely are these people practitioners – they are not part of what's going on. We feel its important that people know that from a practitioner's standpoint, we don't think this is a reasonable form of discussion."
Waugh said the open source movement needs to recognise that those with differing opinions or points of view are not enemies but merely people with whom the industry needs a better dialogue with.
A better response to Gibson's dilemma, he said, would be to promote open source as "the best process we have for creating code in a transparent and scientific environment that benefits from incredible exposure".
"Security through obscurity, of which hiding your source code from the world is one form, only makes you 'feel' safe -- but it also slows down the process of finding and rectifying issues," he said.
"In the open source world, you benefit from the shared resources and enlightened self-interest of a global community. When an issue is found and fixed, everyone benefits."
When comments such as the following are made,
"We would need to make sure that we are very comfortable -- through some form of technical scrutiny -- of what is inside such a product so that there is nothing unforeseen there."
I'm not surprised the shouting started, I would expect any agency, Government or otherwise responsible for such sensitive data to be only prepared to use products that they themselves are able to fully inspect as to the integrity of said software.
To be prepared to rely on the assurance of the supposed well respected vendor of the binary only solution is not appropriate, if this is the approach taken at the ATO well it's just not good enough and people from all walks of life should be jumping up and down.