From Your Pocket to Microsoft: How Jordanians are Paying (a Lot) for Proprietary Software
Issa Mahasneh
Dinar after Dinar the poor Jordanian citizen is paying money to big multinational Software vendors; companies that provide most of the times proprietary and closed source software to our government and public administration.
(CC-BY stuartpilbrow)
The decisions are taken from top without taking into consideration local and public needs, most of the times without even requiring some rational technical specifications. See it this way, IT managers and teams of the governmental institutions have no idea -on the average- about Open Source and Free Software, so even if they want to save some good money and not throwing them to foreign companies they will not ask for a free alternative.
The situation is not better for proprietary software that government purchases, a catastrophic example is EduWave, the e-learning system which is now implemented in every single public school of Jordan, for Ministry of Education teachers and students and for storing Tawjihi marks.
Although EduWave has several Open Source alternatives, the Ministry of Education opted for delegating the implementation of the system to a local company.
The costs were very high, the details were not released to the public, but sources in the ministry confirmed to me an astronomic price for the system, although it could have been surely implemented using Open Source technologies by less than half (or even a quarter) of what our government generously paid.
Anyway, this is not the core problem: The issues that Ministry is now facing are caused by the bad agreement with the company which implemented the project. EduWave is not only licensed using a non-free license, the Ministry does not have the source code, cannot see it and cannot make any change. They have a system with bugs and other issues and they can't do anything, even asking another company to fix them. This is not the only thing, the support and maintenance agreement with the original company will end soon, what will stop this company to ask for even more money to renew the agreement? There is also the possibility that this company will not be able or will not want to provide support anymore, or that the company will fall in bankruptcy. What will the government do in such situations?
This is for sure a bad case in which the government paid a lot for a bad solution. We can learn from our mistakes
At least this was what I thought at first when I heard about the plan of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology to adopt Open Source in the government. But after less than a month, the ministry renewed the "strategic" agreement with Microsoft, this time paying more, every year we pay more than the year before and this time they took from us JD 14 Million ($19.7 Millions). All these millions were taken from Jordanian taxpayers to allow public employees to play on Windows 7 solitaire (as MoICT experts previously said there was no need to renew the licenses), this happened in a year in which the Prime Minister explicitly asked ministries to reduce the expenditures in order to face the economic crisis.
And we keep paying for others' mistakes.
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Comments
Yeah my school uses EduWave as well, it's not stable by any means. I heard from an IT student who was working with the company when they're making this lousy system that it might initially cost a university more than 100,000 JD. Shame.
This is a First-class article, Thank you Issa for the great work :D
I agree with most of what you've said, but there is one issue in adopting open source solutions; in a lot of times the maintenance and support will cost a lot of money.
I know that you can have online support from the communities, but in some cases you will need an expert to solve certain issues and as you know the these experts cost a lot of money.
So anyone have to be careful in his decision of which solution to take.
if the decision makers in the government asked themselves "what do we need to run our computers, manage our documents, play solitaire and to save 14M JD?" they absolutely well get the clear answer : "open source" --but not sure about the solitaire ;) .
microsoft is greedy company they really will do anything just to sell their products, so its zero weirdness that our government has been blackmailed to pay for their products
I find this open source argument fascinating...we hear so much about it - free, open, great software - but when you take a look around, both in Jordan and the rest of the world, you still find that in the majority of cases, governments and companies - both big and small - still tend to be using proprietary software...why is that? Considering its free, how come more people and institutions aren't using it...as a business owner, I believe one of the main problems is the fact that support and maintenance is simply not available locally...I want a specialised, trained, qualified, experienced and professional company to be responsible for my IT...I do not want myself or my IT guy looking around in "communities" for an answer to a problem.
I also like the fact that the software I buy is reliable, comes with a guarantee, has big support, is compatible, comprehensive, regularly updated, theres accountability etc etc - basically everything we have come to expect from a big multi-national regardless of sector. When open source software is available that can provide me with the same level of capabilities and support, then I will switch.
I would think that is the reason the Government went ahead and renewed the agreement with Microsoft and not because of any lack of thought into the matter...same reason, I presume, why I have read on various portals lately news about agreements between Zain, Ahli Bank, Nuqul, and Talal Abu Ghazaleh with Microsoft...did none of them put any consideration into those decisions either?
And knowing the reputations of both Bassam Al Roussan, the previous MOICT Minister, and Marwan Jumaa, the current one, I'm confident that the terms of the agreement were strict and demanding..they would not have simply signed this agreement without going into details...and when you consider that the objective is to unify all the ministries and governmental institutions, ensure all the employees are properly trained and that a modern and well maintained infrastructure is established in order to serve us the citizens better, surely thats a good thing? As a taxpayer I think that, along with the money spent on our road system, is the best investment any of our recent governments have made.
And does open source bring with it what a company like Microsoft brings to Jordan? How much of the ICT sector here benefits and is successful because of their presence in the Kingdom? How many employees do they hire because of the business they generate from Microsoft related work? How much training and support do they receive through being involved with Microsoft? How much tax revenue is generated from their work with Microsoft? People are quick to suggest the open source option, but the overall benefits to the Kingdom from having a "multinational" working here should not be ignored. And by the way - I believe Microsoft here is run by a Jordanian woman - perhaps our local feminist movement should use that as a success story.
And no I am not a Microsoft apologist or employee...however, I had a relative who participated in their Imagine Cup competition last year and I learnt alot about the various programs that Microsoft runs in this country to support the growth and development of our IT sector, our kids, the innovation centre they set up, the skills training they provide for free, the support they give for education etc etc.
Basically - the agreement might have been substantial, but we get a hell of alot back - if not more - in return. I don't think Open Source can achieve that right now.
Thanks for the article Issa.
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