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A San Diego lawyer says California's state government should be forced to dump Microsoft in favor of open-source alternatives. But can free software get into politics without getting dirty?
Aug 27, 2002 | Walt Pennington is a tort lawyer and a member of the San Diego Linux Users Group, and that's about it. He's not an author, a politician or a nationally renowned free-software evangelist; Walt Pennington doesn't file copyright cases with the Supreme Court, he doesn't code, and he doesn't blog. A Google search on "Walt Pennington" gets about 200 results, a Nexis search less than five -- and every article is new, having to do with what seems to be Pennington's only claim to semi-fame: his recent idea that the state of California purchase only open-source software for its governmental operations.
Perhaps because of Pennington's obscurity -- his everyman, fed-up-citizen persona -- his idea is receiving considerable attention in the software industry. For years, open-source software programs such as Linux -- for which all the underlying code is made publicly available -- have been making waves in the software marketplace, challenging even such behemoths as Microsoft. One of Microsoft's biggest markets is government; California alone spends billions of dollars a year on information technology.
Pennington's primary target is Microsoft. In one of the first news articles to cover his proposal, Pennington's local paper, the San Diego Union Tribune, reported in June that he was "waging a one-man campaign" to make California Windows-free, and it gave this clue to his motivation: "He said he's doing this not for financial gain but as a public service to help save taxpayers the cost of Microsoft licensing fees."
For a nobody -- just a concerned citizen -- Pennington has, so far, shown a lot of political savvy. Just look at the name of his proposal: the Digital Software Security Act. It has that pleasing hollowness of most legislative labels these days, a name that's intentionally vague as to the bill's actual purpose. Pennington's use of the word "security" is a red herring. When you talk to him about his idea, he doesn't argue that the state should use open-source software because open software is more secure -- or, in fact, better at anything -- than closed software; instead, he says, open software is cheaper and its licensing conditions less restrictive than proprietary software, and the state shouldn't be wasting money on expensive code that it can't tinker with.
That's the pragmatic half of his argument. The other half is political, and it's very clever: The state of California is on record as holding the view that Microsoft is a very bad company. Dissatisfied with the antitrust settlement the federal government reached with Microsoft in 2001, California and eight other states are asking a federal court to order Microsoft to offer a browserless version of Windows and to release Internet Explorer's source code. "If the state of California is saying [to Microsoft], you are a monopolist and you are hurting the people of California," Pennington says, "its purchasing policy should be in line with that."
Many fans of open-source software say they're inclined to support Pennington's idea because they see it as way to boost open-source software usage via political means. By doing so, they would be adopting a page from their opponent's playbook. After all, companies that have a stake in restrictive intellectual-property regulations -- like Microsoft and the entertainment industry, which are most often cited by the open-source community as being "the enemy" -- are pushing for ever more legislation in their favor. Just this year, Washington has seen the introduction of one bill that would require all digital devices to include copy-protection schemes and another that would legalize the hacking of peer-to-peer networks.
The copy-protection bill, introduced by Sen. Fritz Hollings, has open-source and free-software advocates particularly alarmed. Since anyone with programming skills could rejigger an open-source operating system to include features that circumvent copy protection, open-source software itself could technically be illegal if the bill passes. Therefore, say advocates, in a political climate where the freedom to use your computer as you see fit is under ever increasing assault, isn't it time to fight back with every weapon in the arsenal?
