[WEB4LIB] Re: The beginning of the end for the Netscape Browser???

[Richard L. Goerwitz III]

Please accept my apologies if this response seems a bit scathing.
It's not directed at Dan really (although he's quoted below).  Dan
is far more practical and reasonable than most.  My comments also
do not apply to all libraries (just to "all to many" of them) -

Dan wrote:

> I'm not interested in engaging in any browser, OS, or platform
> warfare.  My point is simply that many organizations, whether profit
> or nonprofit, want a commercial product that has support.

The implicit assumptions here are 1) that commercial products are
supported, and 2) that free ones are not.

Typically commercial products are supported, by some definition of
the word.  But what typically passes for support in most shops is
somewhat less useful than, say, the help readily available for free
software like Apache and Linux - which, by the way, you can buy
commercial support for.

It seems to me that in a lot of situations, if not most situations,
the debate here really isn't about quantifiable issues.  Or, more to
the point, to the extent that the issues being discussed are quanti-
fiable (e.g., the raw support costs), they aren't the real basis
for the debate.

For example, at one place where I've worked the computing infra-
structure was hopeless divided between what I called the "old hippie
mainframers" and the "Unix cowboys".  The old hippie mainframers
in this crowd had a deep-seated aversion to open-source software,
the GPL, and often seemed indifferent to open standards.  Insofar
as they knew or cared what had happened in the the IT world for
the last ten years they tended to gravitate towards Microsoft.  The
reasons for this were transparent.  Microsoft is for them what IBM
was in the 80s.  Microsoft is big, indifferent to standards, hos-
tile to open-source software (for obvious business reasons), and
it's obviously not going away any time soon.

There's no reasoning with people like this because their views
are more a natural outgrowth of their way of life and of looking
at information technology than they are a set of carefully reasoned
positions.  Not to say they're wrong, or even misguided.  The most
you could say is that they're just not open to seeing the bigger
picture - and how it's changed in very recent years.

In a moment, I'll get to my (perhaps brutal) appraisal of what's
going on in much of the library-IT world, but before doing that,
the point about recent changes in the big picture merits emphasis.

The fact is that over the last six years the open-source movement
has matured and become a factor that it simply wasn't before.  It
is appropriate, especially for libraries and universities, to take
a serious look at it, if for no other reasons that it's cheap and
it fits in with the open, inclusive, uncommercialized spirit that
forms a key distinction betwen us and the business world.

Ironically, intransigence seems as alive and well here in the lib-
rary world as it is elsewhere; it is the business world that (for
various competitive reasons) will probably end up being the early
adopters when it comes to things like Linux!  What's even funnier
is that countries like China, Japan, and India are rapidly begin-
ning to see it as a way to leap ahead.  In an ironic twist of fate,
it is IBM (yes, IBM) that is pouring millions of dollars into Linux
and that has just joined hands with a number of Asian firms to bring
Linux up to the level of enterprise reliability they're accustomed
to in mainframes (NB, Linux is already at least as reliable as any
OS Microsoft has ever produced).  Linux is leaping ahead in the em-
bedded systems world.  It's even beginning to come out as the basis
for PDAs.  And Linux-based open-source projects are popping up
everywhere.

It's a wonderful, exciting time.  Yet by and large libraries have
missed the boat.  Or, to use another metaphor, they're just sitting
on the fence.  (This second metaphor is more apt, because there's
still time to leap off the fence.)

If you think about it, this is hardly a suprise.  Many libraries
look at the world like my old hippie mainframer pals.  Only instead
of getting that warm feeling from IBM, they get their warm feeling
by hiring anemic IT staffs then buying big, monololithic packages
from OPAC vendors who charge them enormous amounts of money for 
what is, after all, generally unremarkable software.  Yet there's no
outrage.  And when people cough up truly innovative ideas like band-
ing together to seriously force the vendors' hands, or joining up
to create something like an open-source OPAC, they are usually 
scoffed at.  (I've seen this; and yes, ideas have been floated for
an open-source OPAC; I've seen consortial proposals, and one actual
business plan).

The fact is that libraries, although sometimes offering shining ex-
amples of exciting new initiatives, are all too often bastions of
tired, apathetic, if not downright reactionary, thinking when it
comes to IT.

An unwillingness to look seriously at open-source software, where
it is _appropriate_, and seriously retrain to use it effectively,
is just a symptom of that way of thinking.

-- 

Richard Goerwitz                               richard at Goerwitz.COM
tel: 401 438 8978