Page 33 - GCN, May 2017

Open source is everywhere in government, but many agencies still struggle with the specifics of choosing, contracting for and contributing to open-source software projects. GCN spoke with open-source advocates in govern- ment and industry, and came away
be boxed into yet another sort of bad procurement.”
Avoiding vendor lock-in is a good reason to seriously consider open source, he added. “There’s a massive number of small and midsize compa- nies that can do this. And if you don’t like the work or support you’re get- ting, you don’t have to re-platform.”
Everyone interviewed for this ar- ticle agreed, however: Each open- source solution should be viewed as a potential tool, but the agency mission must drive the decision about which
KNOW WHAT A HEALTHY OPEN-SOURCE PROJECT LOOKS LIKE
First make sure the software in ques- tion “is actually a free and open- source project and that all of the features you want to use are also free and open source,” said Jones, who now works at CivicActions. Especially in niche markets, companies will of- fer “what is known as ‘open core,’ where the base features are FOSS, but the valuable stuff that sets them apart in the market is proprietary.”
Even worse, some allegedly open- source projects carry restrictive pro- prietary licenses. “They simply mean that you can view the source code,” he said.
Once potential open-source solu- tions have been identified, ProudCity CEO Luke Fretwell said his firm offers a short checklist to gauge viability.
First, he asked, “are there main- tainers who are true leaders in the community?” Brian Behlendorf and Matt Mullenweg, for example, are the highly collaborative faces of the Apache web server and WordPress, respectively. “That’s one litmus test because they are banking their per- sonas and careers on those projects.”
Second, Fretwell asked, “is there a sustainable business that is basing its primary business model off of this product? If there is, that’s another check.”
Third is use. The “consumption
side” is important — a broad user base means there’s demand for con- tinued development — but what he looks for is the number of contribut- ing software developers, both indi- viduals and businesses.
Fretwell also said he checks to see whether the open-source project has “the standard aspects of any sort of industry. Does it have annual events or local communities that are engag- ing? Are those active?”
Poole echoed those points and stressed the need to “analyze the eco- system around the code.”
w1
BE CLEAR ABOUT
ith five fundamental lessons.
YOUR END GOAL
“The most important thing when selecting a \[free and open-source\] project is picking one that aligns with your business goals,” said Marc Jones, an attorney and longtime sys- tems architect in state government. “You do not want to pick a project and then realize you now need to in- vest a lot of effort into modifications to meet your needs. In that respect, it is very similar to acquiring propri- etary software.”
Tom Cochran, chief digital strat- egist and vice president for public sector at Acquia, agreed. “It would be myopic for any organization to say, ‘We’re going to default to open source for everything,’” said Cochran, who previously worked at the State Department and the White House. “Open source should be considered as part of the suite of possible solu- tions.... It really needs to be done on a case-by-case basis.”
CivicActions CEO Henry Poole, however, argued that open source can and should be an end goal for government. “Public funds are paying for the public good,” he said. “Hav- ing that code be publicly available, in my opinion, is the right thing to do, just from the point of view of the tax- payer.... You really want to move your acquisition strategy to paying for new technology, not paying for something that already exists.”
“At the White House, we actually did plant a flag in the ground saying, ‘It had to be open source,’” Cochran said. “Some of that was in reaction to such poor closed-source systems that we had that we didn’t want to
ool to choose.
t2
For the web efforts for former Presi- dent Barack Obama’s White House, Cochran said, Drupal was picked “largely because of the community. The bigger the support community is, that’s how you’re magnifying and am-
lifying your own engineering team.”
p3
PICK YOUR VENDORS
WISELY
“The first and most important thing is to have someone on staff who knows what they’re doing and what they’re talking about,” Cochran said. It’s even more important to have someone “who knows what they don’t know.”
“Honestly, it just comes down to relationships and finding the right people who can help you navigate whichever community it is you’re try- ing to get into,” he added.
Fretwell said a contractor’s qualifica- tions boil down to two things: “Show me your code, \[and then\] how in- volved are you with the community?”
Any organization serious about its open-source contributions will have an active GitHub presence where that work can be examined, he add- ed. And a firm whose employees are maintaining components of an open- source project, speaking at confer- ences and engaging with other con- tributors will have the expertise and connections to deliver for an agency.
“There’s no barrier to entry” in open source, Fretwell said. “It’s all passion and effort. So if you’re assessing a company...that’s a litmus test: How
GCN MAY 2017 • GCN.COM 29