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 SPECIAL FOCUS: OPEN STANDARDS IN GOVERNMENT

 
By mandating the use of open standards, governments are in a unique position to influence the IT industry. 

Open standards have been a bone of contention in the IT industry for decades. In the modern world, the issues focus on document and data interchange standards and open source principles, but the origin of the debate is almost as old as the computer industry itself. The term has numerous definitions. A short version has been given by Microsoft India’s Vijay Kapoor: “Let’s look at what an open standard means: ‘open’ refers to it being royalty-free, while ‘standard’ means a technology approved by formalised committees that are open to participation by all interested parties and operate on a consensus basis. An open standard is publicly available, and developed, approved and maintained via a collaborative and consensus driven process.”

While this definition has the advantage of being concise, it lacks detail. The principles at stake, however, have been argued for decades. 

It is in the interest of most dominant technology vendors to establish what are known as ‘de facto standards’, which permit them to control the specifications of technology used by customers and lock them in to that vendor’s products. Many companies have been guilty of this practise over the years. IBM, as one of the early giants, has taken a lot of heat over the matter, and has also felt the brunt of competition from Japanese “plug-compatible” hardware, which exploited the inherent openness of simple standards that can be reverse-engineered. Yet, the truth is that most vendors at one time or another have set standards that did not work with the equipment and software of other vendors.

Standards organisations such as the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the International Standards Organisation (ISO), the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and The Open Group (formerly XOpen) emerged. The latter has trademarked an even more concise definition: Boundaryless information flow. 

Embrace and extend

Conflicting standards have long dogged standards bodies. The problems with open standards have been compounded by vendor strategies such as Microsoft’s much maligned ‘embrace and extend’ policy. This strategy, most famously used against Sun’s Java language, involved adopting a standard, but then implementing an extended version, which by virtue of customer use became a de facto standard. In this manner, the offending software could interpret Java created using other vendors’ implementations, but not vice versa, so if someone used Microsoft software to create documents or products, their work would require Microsoft software to read or run.

Microsoft’s own explanation runs as follows: “In economics there is a well-understood concept called switching costs – how much it costs for a trading partner to change partners. Our philosophy on switching costs is very clear: we want low switching costs for customers who want to start using our platform, and we want to provide so much unique value that there are, in effect, high costs of deciding to move to a different platform. There is a name for this: it is called ‘Embrace and Extend’.” 

Microsoft is far from the only vendor that is guilty of this practice. Many applications created using Apple’s tools on Apple computer, for example, fail to work on other Unix-based systems for exactly the same reasons.

Interoperability is the goal

Research undertaken by Gartner indicates that government moves towards embracing open source software solutions are driven, in part, by the quest to implement open standards and development processes in an effort to achieve some semblance of vendor independence and interoperability in government IT procurement. In Europe, respondents to a Gartner survey ranked open standards 3rd on a list of 15 drivers of open source software uptake; internationally, it featured 7th on the list. 

As The Shuttleworth Foundation’s Andrew Rens puts it, the single-vendor-fits-all philosophy is “the digital equivalent of putting all your eggs in one basket.” Those in favour of adopting open standards in government point to the dangers inherent in entrusting a handful of powerful vendors with all their data, not only from a national security point of view, but also in terms of freedom of information. Rens points out that requiring citizens to purchase or acquire a particular brand of technology in order to access state information prevents equality of access – a cornerstone of good egovernment.

On the security front, SITA’s Daniel Mashao says, “It’s one thing to be assured that your network is secure based on a source code you’ve never seen and quite another to be able to see the source and know you can make improvements if the situation warrants it.” 

One area where standards make the most difference is in data formats. Like many other countries, South Africa’s government has published a set of Minimum Inter-Operability Standards (MIOS), which make adherence to open standards, where possible, mandatory across all spheres of government. They also make funding for government projects dependent on the degree to which they are compliant with the MIOS.

In the foreword to these standards, the former minister of public services and administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moloketi, writes: “Improved public service delivery tailored to citizen and business needs, as envisioned in the e-Government Strategic Framework published in 2007, requires the seamless flow of information across all tiers of government. The MIOS sets out the government’s technical principles and standards for achieving interoperability and information systems coherence across the public sector. The MIOS defines the essential prerequisite for joined-up and Web-enabled government. Next to security, it is an essential component in the overall e-government strategy.”

In order to be considered by government as a standard, the following criteria must be met: – It should be maintained by a non-commercial organisation

– Participation in the ongoing development work is based on decision-making processes that are open to all interested parties

– Open access: all may access committee documents, drafts and completed standards free of cost or for a negligible fee

– It must be possible for everyone to copy, distribute and use the standard free of cost

– The intellectual rights required to implement the standard (e.g. essential patent claims) are irrevocably available, without any royalties attached

– There are no reservations regarding reuse of the standard

– There are multiple implementations of the standard.

NORWAY’S GOT STANDARDS Starting from January 2012, Norwegian public servants will be obliged to use Open Document Format (ODF) and Portable Document Format (PDF) standards when emailing documents to citizens and businesses. These formats are just two open standards requirements on a list of requirements that includes multimedia formats Theora, Ogg, Vorbis and Flac as well as open source image format PNG – all to be used on government Web sites. The Norwegian government’s “Reference Catalogue for IT Standards in the public sector” was published in June 2009, and represents an advance on its 2007 directive that all state documents offered online be in open formats.

The document proceeds to outline preferred standards for such functions as Web services, content management metadata, biometric data interchange, data interoperability, mobile phones and information access.

Those technologists who follow standards will recognise the acronyms that litter the MIOS document: XML, SOAP, UML, XHTML, Unicode, UDDI, WSDL, CSV, and ODF.

The latter is probably best know by end-users as an open format for document data, to which word processors are expected to conform (in favour of proprietary formats such as Microsoft’s .doc format, or complex, partially-implemented formats such as OOXML).

The purpose of such a standard is to ensure not only that all users of government data can access and use that data without being required to purchase specific software, but also that this data will remain available even if software should change in future.

This last requirement appears trivial, but a great deal of existing data is locked up on tapes, cartridges, floppy disks, and even books, which modern computer systems can no longer access without specialist hardware or software. In a world in which the amount of public data is growing exponentially, this poses a grave threat to government data. “Open standards are a pragmatic way for governments and businesses to address issues of data independence as well as information silos,” says Rens. But signing up to open standards, he says, is not the same as committing to treating all vendors the same, it’s about offering vendors a clear formula for what they need to offer government if they want their solutions to be used. “Different agencies and departments have different needs. It’s hard to impose vertically for each category of software, everyone shouldn’t have to use the same solutions; what we do need to ensure is compatibility, so that data can be accessed and exchanged freely.”

Playing politics?

Some commentators, among them Microsoft Director of Standards Jason Matsuwov, have stated that they believe it’s wrong for governments to mandate specific technologies as this injects political considerations into the IT decision-making process. The key point about open standards, however, is its neutrality – all it asks is interoperability. The South African government has stated that its commitment to open standards (and, for that matter, open source applications) is only as good as the justification for it. Where there is a compelling argument against open standards/source, it will be given credence.

There is also a school of thought that believes that because so much money and time has already been invested in closed solutions, government must stick with them, building all subsequent initiatives on that foundation. The problem here, as Rens points out, is that SA’s government spend on ICT in coming years will be so significant that we simply cannot afford to chain ourselves to a scant handful of solutions. The knock-on effects would be too great; lock-in is not an option.

Government’s MIOS represents a good start in establishing an overall vision. “Right now, resources dictate the levels of compliance with these goals,” says Rens, who believes that, if governments invested in establishing a full-time training centre for government IT practitioners that focused entirely on open standards, “it would do more to transform e-government than anything else they could do.”

The struggle continues

 Establishing a policy and implementing it, however, remain different things. Two recent examples serve to illustrate the ongoing challenges with open standards in government. In the 2005 edition of this handbook, it was noted that the Independent Electoral Commission’s elections.org.za site was accessible only using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Browser. It relied heavily on Microsoft’s VBScript language and some parts of the site worked only on the Windows operating system. This situation continued until 2008, when a complaint was laid with the Human Rights Commission by Aslam Raffee, then the chief information officer at the Department of Science and Technology and the chair of government’s Open

Source Software and Open Standards Working Group; Daniel Mashao, chief technical officer of the State IT Agency; and Helen King, of The Shuttleworth Foundation. Clearly, the MIOS had not been followed, and there was no excuse that open standards for these functions were not available, so the government declined to allocate additional funding to the IEC to remedy the problem.

Under pressure, the IEC commissioned a new Web site at a reported cost of millions, diverting the funds from other budgeted work, and Libisi Maphanga, the chief information officer at the IEC, was quoted in the media blaming “disgruntled citizens” for “disruption to our regular work”.

More recently, another multimillion-rand Web site project came under fire, and not only for its cost. The official FIFA World Cup 2010 site for Durban has become the subject of questions raised in the eThekwini City Council by the opposition Democratic Alliance, about its use of expensive proprietary technologies, when open standards and open source solutions are not only available, but are already in use for the existing Durban Web site.

The opportunity for government

Since standards organisations don’t have any legal clout, and many vendors have strong motives to avoid, or actively sabotage, open standards, it is left to the demands of customers to ensure that information systems are interoperable and that data is accessible to all who may have a legitimate need for it.

Many users, however, take the path of least resistance, or are simply not well enough informed about the open standards that are available.

Governments, by contrast, being not only the biggest customers of information technology services in most countries, but also mandated by the electorate to promote the public interest, are in a unique position to use their financial muscle to promote standards and encourage vendors to comply with open standards.

Much still needs to be done to move from policy intention to practical implementation, however. There’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip.