Lessons From Open Source in the Mexican Government
- Author: Jake Edge
- Full Title: Lessons From Open Source in the Mexican Government
- Type:
- Tags: #tech
- URL: https://lwn.net/Articles/1013776/
Highlights
- The other big challenge from this project was in being able return code that was developed for Mexican banking to the Mifos project. Banking institutions have security concerns about releasing code, but the Mifos community wanted to add the code to its repository and tout the deployment, which was one of the largest ever. That was a conversation that played out over three years and eventually resulted in a complicated scheme where older versions of the code could be added to Mifos after two subsequent releases were rolled out to production. (View Highlight)
- Whenever the idea of using open-source software was raised, there was fear because of a lack of knowledge about it, but, because the decision-makers were government officials, there was legal fear on top of that. "That liability could get you into jail, so don't change the technology, leave whatever there is, pay those millions, and nothing will happen, you will be fine." (View Highlight)
- Another reason that projects would fail was because the leadership decided that switching to open source meant that no money would be needed in the future. But servers, developers, system administrators, and so on still require a budget if the project is going to succeed. Beyond that, some of the government employees did not have any interest in acquiring the skills needed to switch to open-source software. Many were happy to hand the whole job off to a vendor due to lack of knowledge or "other personal motives". (View Highlight)
- His "number one recommendation" is to ensure, even before the project gets started, that it has the right champion and backing inside the agency or organization; that is the real determiner for whether a project will succeed or fail. (View Highlight)
- In answer to a question about license audits (to enforce compliance with proprietary-software terms) that was asked by a Mexican citizen who used to work at INFOTEC as a contractor, González Waite said that all of the large proprietary software companies "are big bullies". He has been called into the US embassy and been threatened because Mexico was using technology that was not from the US; those threats were dialed back when he explained that the government also used software and services from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Various companies use the US government to bully other countries, but they also use license audits as a reaction to projects that move to open-source software. Every time a successful switch happened, "six months later there was an audit"; having the right legal team helps defend against those tactics, he said. (View Highlight)
- The final question that he took was about handling obsolescence in the libraries and other dependencies within government systems; many of those projects will run for decades, but the dependencies may not be maintained for that long. González Waite agreed that it is a major problem; many governments are run by politicians with a short attention span. The politicians are looking for recognition, which leads to votes, and then they move onto the next thing. (View Highlight)