Linux in Government: The Government Open Code Collaborative

As we celebrate the holiday season and prepare for the next round
of legislation, a group of state and local governments has banded
together to collect and distribute freely the costly software that
normally runs taxpayers $100 billion annually. Called the Government Open
Code Collaborative or GOCC.gov,
this organization states that its members work together voluntarily to
encourage "the sharing, at no cost, of computer code developed for and
by government entities where the redistribution of this code is
allowed".

In addition to state and local governments, the organization also
encourages collaboration between public sector entities and non-profit
academic institutions. With Web facilities hosted by the University
of Rhode Island, GOCC.gov has a repository dedicated to hosting
open-source software for download by any state or local government.

As so many people have said, "Nothing is as powerful
as an idea whose time has come." And GOCC.gov is an idea whose time is
long overdue. Open-source advocates attempting to initiate legislation
and fight the battles on the floors of the various Houses, only to
discover the political might and opposition of Microsoft, now have an
alternative. State agencies now can download software for free and
use it to create a cohesive and standard government infrastructure.

Instead of every county in the country buying the same Commercial
Off-the-Shelf Software (COTS) 3,750 times, they simply can find what
they need, download it and install it--a design similar to the
distribution of Linux. Think of the cost savings and standardization
this offers Homeland Security, law enforcement, the judicial system, deed
databases, eGovernment applications and financial applications, to
mention only a few areas. Additionally, the concerns of connecting various
disparate databases across the country, a topic we heard about daily during
the last campaign season, can be put to rest.

An example of the kind of software you can find on the GOCC.gov site is
Election Tally, contributed by the city of Newport News, Virginia. Election Tally
is a parameter-driven Web-enabled application written in Python and utilizing
ModPython and MySQL. It generates an election tally report by extracting files
for the state Board of Elections and produces a video simulcast.

That's pretty heady technology available to everyone in the country. In
my voting precinct, our team had to generate the results and post them on the door
of the polling place. If we could interest the Dallas County Election
Board in adopting Election Tally, it would allow us to interface our polling
machines directly with headquarters. The commission immediately could begin
its audit, save time and eliminate voter fraud.

Of the many types and kinds of participants, eight states now participate to some extent
in GOCC.gov: Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Utah,
West Virginia, Virginia, Texas and New York. In the majority of cases,
individual agencies have joined. Of course, GOCC.gov hopes to attract
every state in the country. The more governments that participate,
the faster the adoption rate can grow, along with the cost savings.
Beginnings
According to the GOCC.gov site:

The organizing meeting of the GOCC was sponsored in December 2003, by the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in conjunction with Harvard University
and MIT. The morning session at Harvard University's Kennedy School
of Government was conducted by Professor L. Jean Camp, who presented
an excellent tutorial on the various license options available to code
sharers. Sparing every expense, the attendees took advantage of the
Commonwealth's excellent public transportation system and used the
MBTA's Red Line to make the transition to MIT for the afternoon program.

The afternoon session at MIT included an audio bridge for those folks
that could not attend in person. The genesis of the collaborative was
vetted and launched through a discussion facilitated by Dan Greenwood
of MIT's E-Commerce Architecture Program. Dan has been a significant
contributor to this initiative from inception. Through a series of
subsequent audio conferences, the group agreed to the operating rules
for the collaborative and the repository, the governance and officer
structure and the actual announcement process. Highlights include the
following:

The GOCC will be entirely independent and not affiliated with
any professional or private sector entity.

The GOCC will accept no financial or in-kind assistance from any private
sector company. All initial members will be either municipalities,
legal entities of state government, or academic non-profit institutions.

Four officer positions were established to serve for one year:

• Chairperson: Peter Quinn, CIO, Commonwealth of
  Massachusetts
• Municipality Representative: Mike Wells, CIO,
  Gloucester, Massachusetts
• Technical Lead: Jim Willis, CIO, Secretary of State, RI
• Policy Lead: Patrick McCormick, Harvard University,
  Kennedy School of Government

On June 30, 2004, GOCC.gov made an official announcement that it was
in business. Again, according to the Web site, "The Commonwealth of
Massachusetts Information Technology Division; the Rhode Island Office of
the Secretary of State; the Pennsylvania Office of Information Technology;
the Utah Governor's Office, CIO Section; the Kansas Secretary of State
Office; the Kansas Treasurer's Office; the Missouri Secretary of State
Office; the West Virginia Auditor's Office; the City of Gloucester, MA;
the City of Worcester, MA; and the City of Newport News, VA, [announced]
the formation of the Government Open Code Collaborative (GOCC)."

The GOCC wants to offer only code licensed under an "OSI Approved License" or any
other open-source license deemed acceptable under the GOCC's operating
rules. And according to the GOCC, this code routinely is referred to as
either "Open Source Software", "Free Software" and, less frequently, by
other similar names.

GOCC also states that:

Government entities, defined as a federal, state
or local government, an authority or other sub-national public sector
entity of the United States, can join the GOCC as Members by signing
the GOCC Operating Agreement through an authorized representative. The
signatory or their designee can then appoint additional members within
their entities.

Private non-profit U.S. academic institutions can also become
members by signing the GOCC Operating Agreement through an authorized
representative. The signatory or their designee can then appoint
additional members within their institutions.

People belonging to a government entity or private non-profit academic
institution that has not signed the Operating Agreement can participate
with an Observer status. Representatives of non-profit associations
of public entities can also participate as Observers. Observers have
to be sponsored by a Member. Observers are able to join the GOCC list
server to receive announcements and participate in discussions and are
encouraged to participate in the GOCC bi-weekly conference calls.
Do You See Anything Wrong with This Picture?
Have you ever heard the cliche about prisoners running the
asylum? Well, this gated and restrictive organization fits. Get a
group of academics together with management and grow the group in the infertile
soil of bureaucracy, and you will spend almost all of your time waiting.
Watching the group from a distance over the past year reminds one
of inexperienced farmers trying to plant a field of corn by reading books.

GOCC.gov is a Cathedral trying to say it's a Bazaar. You might as
well call the Java programming language open-source software. GOCC.gov
goes through the motion of calling itself an open-source collaboration,
yet it excludes the people that can bring the vision to fruition.

GOCC.gov ignores the existing base of software by excluding vendors from
donating their solutions. It excludes contributors from the Linux
and Open Source community not affiliated with a government or academic
entity. So where will it find the people with the skills to develop
the repository? Within its own infrastructure? Perhaps you now see
why I used the cliche about asylums.

Can anyone see a business model here? Read the GOCC.gov charter and you
discover that it has built one more bureaucracy to oversee its existing
bureaucracy, with oversight over the new bureaucracy. What else
would one expect?

In an article titled
"IBM:
'Inertia' holding back government desktop Linux adoption", the executives of Big Blue
identify inertia as the primary reason governments haven't adopted open-source solutions in
England. IBM's public sector business development executive Jeremy Wray said, "[the] single
biggest factor holding back government departments from migrating to the Linux desktop is
inertia. At the moment public sector departments lack a compelling
reason to act." Unwittingly, he has described a property of all bureaucratic
organizations, one that IBM itself has helped foster. If bureaucracies don't have
a problem to manage, they have no reason to exist.

The idea of inertia comes from Newton's first law. One definition
identifies inertia as "the property of an object describing its
tendency to stay at the same velocity (or at rest) unless a force acts
on it". So inertia is a property, not a cause. Inertia is a property
of bureaucracies, and it doesn't change unless acted on.

If you want to see how vigorous GOCC.gov has been over the past year,
look at its list of
software. That's right, you're looking at five pieces of
software, one of which is an application. That's what GOCC.gov has
accomplished in one year. If you think that's strange, consider also that
it took this "Collaborative" six months to announce it existed.

Now, drop down to the membership list and look at the
contributions from
Texas. Click on that link, and you get "There are currently no
items in this folder".

The CIO of my great state has taken some pride in
letting people know that the "Texas Open Source Bill" hasn't passed and won't pass. As
she has said in public, "it's dead". Yet, within Texas, the Department of
Information Resources touts its open-source sharing plan,
as seen
here.

One of the touted programs in Texas is the Governor's Office database
of solutions for free source code. When you visit
the Web site,
you find
the same solutions
that have existed for two years. You also can find
the same testimonial
that has existed for the same time period. This is an attempt to say they
have all these pieces together so the legislature won't force the issue
as they tried in 2003. Unfortunately, the Senator sponsoring SB 1579
understands the issues and plans to act in 2005.
Can GOCC.gov Work?
In its present condition, GOCC.gov cannot work. In a closed community,
a member must receive some benefit to join. If I join and contribute
software, what do I receive in return? If the operation is gated and
closed and I must provide software support, I at least need to be able to
swap for something in return. If I can download any software for free
without becoming a member, why would I want to expose my organization to
legal liability? When you look at the GOCC Operating Agreement and at
the organization, someone outside of the Collaborative--"the Member
contributing code"--assumes liability for the code working. Why
would I want to do that?

Read the
GOCC Operating Agreement
to get an idea of the restrictions placed on those who can contribute code and
their responsibilities. The restrictions and the lack of incentive
provide no cost-benefit ratio. Governments have accountability to their
constituents, and GOCC.gov needs to ask two simple questions: Why do constituents
have to be the first ones to pay for the application, spend the money supporting
it and risk liability? And what do they get in return?
How Can GOCC.gov Work?
The Collaborative should accept contributions of open-source software
from vendors who have implemented existing solutions. In other words,
open up the repository to people who have products that governments need
and cannot afford. Secondly, let the vendors build a business plan around
the GOCC repository.

For example, if I have a project such as the
LibraryofTexas.org,
let the vendor who already has open-sourced the project contribute the software.
If a small town in Alabama wants to deploy it and has the manpower,
they would do it themselves.

However, if a city such as Cleveland wants to deploy the software and
would rather hire the originator of the product to install it and train
people, then the originator could charge for their services. The
contributor gets his software exposed on what could become the largest
government software repository in the world. That exposure would provide
vendors with an incentive to contribute, because they have a chance to
increase their install base.

The alternative to having vendors contribute and provide services is to
wait. GOCC.gov can wait for everybody in government to learn Linux and
then do everything themselves. By the time that happens, though, we won't
need computers any more. We'll have evolved into cyber-beings and telepaths.
Resources
Linux in
Government: Stanislaus County Does Linux with a Best Practices
Slant

Linux in
Government: CORE.gov

Linux in
Government: Federal Contracts, A New Era of Competition

Tom Adelstein lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, Yvonne, and
works as a Linux and open-source software consultant locally and
nationally. He's the co-author of the book Exploring the JDS Linux
Desktop, published by O'Reilly and Associates. Tom has written numerous
articles on Linux technical and marketing issues as a guest editor for a
variety of publications. His latest venture has him working as the
webmaster of JDSHelp.org.