An Experiment in Scotch

There’s some chat­ter in the inter­nets this morn­ing about Hun­gary “boost­ing” open source use by requir­ing all their civil ser­vants to spend equal amounts of money on open source soft­ware and pro­pri­etary soft­ware. Accord­ing to the linked arti­cle this “will be the first time that open source will gain equal sta­tus with pro­pri­etary ven­dors in cen­tralised pub­lic sec­tor tenders.”

Of course, the prob­lem is that open source is only gain­ing equal sta­tus at the point of a gun and NOT based on its supe­ri­or­ity. There is just as much chance of this hav­ing a detri­men­tal effect on open source as it does hav­ing a pos­i­tive effect. When you throw money at things that don’t deserve, you don’t often get a supe­rior product.

I use quite a few open source tools in my day to day devel­op­ment but I do that because they are bet­ter than the pro­pri­etary alter­na­tives. I donate to these projects because they make my job or life eas­ier. There are lots of open source tools I’ve tried that aren’t too great and I can’t imag­ine being forced to spend money on them just to sup­pos­edly level the play­ing field.

Open source suc­ceeds because of the ded­i­ca­tion and tal­ent of a very diverse com­mu­nity. Forc­ing peo­ple to use it doesn’t fur­ther that cause. If any­thing, it may end up attract­ing peo­ple with less tal­ent but more greed as they eye 40 mil­lion euros in gov­ern­ment largesse. Forc­ing tax­pay­ers to fund projects that may or may not be bet­ter than their pro­pri­etary coun­ter­parts will likely be largely coun­ter­pro­duc­tive and lead the open source com­mu­nity, at least as it relates to what Hun­gary spends its dol­lars on, away from inno­va­tion and towards a chase for cash.

Fur­ther and deeper thoughts on what the cause and effect of this will be can be found here.