Comment Articles

Open is the new closed

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 04 Dec 2003 17:00 GMT

It's all well and good to talk about ethics, but if companies and businesses can get away with it -- they will. Things are made more problematic given Microsoft's refusal to back down on its global one-price policy, which sees it charge the same amount for software regardless of the market. Asian authorities claim the pricing model is unfair and say that it should be tied to local economic conditions.

To force the issue, several Asian governments have begun to investigate open source, either because of a genuine interest in cheaper alternatives or in an effort to force Microsoft to capitulate. Japan, China and South Korea announced a deal in September to jointly research and develop non-Windows, open-source operating systems. The Japanese government has already reserved 1bn yen (£5.5m) for the project, and plans to support an open-source software forum to be established by major Japanese electronic firms such as Hitachi, Matsushita, NEC and Fujitsu.

There are a lot of factors at work here but one of the major issues aside from the price of Microsoft products seems to be security and wariness on the part of Asian governments of giving what they see as monopolistic control of crucial software to foreign corporations. Microsoft has gone some way to alleviate these fears with its Government Security Program (GSP) which gives some countries -- including China -- access to key parts of Microsoft's source code.

The GSP, and another programme called the Shared Source Initiative which operates along similar lines but includes companies as well as governments, can be viewed as necessary to alleviate security fears among foreign powers or a natural reaction to increasing competition from open source. Whether government's really intend to go ahead with open source deployments or are simply using them as a stick to beat Microsoft with is unclear but either way it is having an effect.

The latest move by Microsoft to be seen as open, fluffy and approachable came this week with the announcement that it plans to license more of its intellectual property to other companies beginning with its FAT file system and ClearType fonts. Microsoft has dressed this up as not a commercial decision but all about "working better and promoting better collaboration with the industry". But analyst claim that regulatory pressures, especially from European authorities, probably also played a part.

While openness with developers might have ended with an own goal for Microsoft with the Malaysian Longhorn incident, the boys at Redmond realise that the days of being closed and aloof are over. Open-source ideals have begun to alter the proprietary playing field of the IT industry and when it comes to choosing a vendor, transparency and approachability have become perquisites for governments and businesses.