Mark Johnson Of OSS Watch Opens Up About The Challenges Of Open Source Procurement

The OSS Watch blog has been on our radar for a while now as a great resource for open source commentary. We've looked to their team, including development manager Mark Johnson, for thought leadership on how open source software is being used and to gauge the pulse of the open source movement. I wanted to find out more about what Mark does day-to-day to promote better understanding of open source. He's got a knack for communication: concise with impact...

What are the biggest challenges to openness that you encounter, either at work or in your life?

One of the areas OSS Watch works in is procurement, to help people consider free and open source solutions equally with proprietary ones. There are a few challenges we come across here.

Firstly, there's often confusion around the term "free software." While we think it's important that people understand the principles of software freedom, since a big advantage of a free and open source software (FOSS) solution is the freedom to customise it without additional permission, too often the term is misunderstood. We often get people talking to us about their uses of free software, when they're really using freeware or the free usage tier of a software-as-a-service platform, both of which miss the point. We recently conducted our bi-annual National Software Survey of UK colleges and universities to find out how software is used and procured in educational institutions. One key consideration given for choosing software was "interoperability," although risk of vendor lock-in was given very little consideration. Looking at the actual software used, Microsoft solutions were ubiquitous. This suggests to me that when institutions talk about "interoperability," they mean "software from one vendor works with other software from that vendor" and not "different software supporting open standards all works together." This is clearly a problem for FOSS adoption...