Not a Sustainable Position

Somebody clearly doesn't understand open source:

Despite a mission to make the games as financially and environmentally sustainable as possible, the organisers of London 2012 have ruled out any significant use of open source software.

Open source is the *only* sustainable option for software, because it can be re-used - one of the great advantages of free software. So given that open source should be the only option, why aren't the organisers using it?

“My primary driver here is to deliver the Olympics and that means using proven applications software and by and large that application software does not run on open standards – there are some exceptions to that we are running a little bit of Linux but by and large it is Windows orientated,” he said.

What planet is this man living on? "Proven software...does not run on open standards"? What, like Apache, or Sendmail or BIND or JBoss or MySQL? Well, it's clear which Olympics event *he* would come first in: clueless CIO twit of the year.

Behold! The New Anti-Open Access FUD

As I've noted before, I'm something of a connoisseur of FUD, and I really like coming across new examples. Here's one, directed at the burgeoning open access movement, which wants to make publicly-paid for scientific papers freely available (and others, too):

'The idea of public access to research information is a little bit specious,' added Robert Parker, managing director of RSC publishing. 'The UK government will be funding the London Olympics in 2012, but that doesn't mean that everybody can have free tickets - there is a big difference between funding something and having it be freely available.'

Nice sleight of hand there, Robbie. Except that the UK government is funding the Olympics in the (probably mistaken) belief that everyone will benefit from the knock-on effects on the economy, world prestige, blah-blah-blah: so there *is* an expectation of getting something in return for the public funds. And of course no one expects free seats - because there is a finite number of them - whereas the larger benefits, if they materialise, can be shared.

Open access is different because taxpayers can benefit from it directly. Most importantly, though, open access is digital in nature, and therefore can be copied and distributed for effectively zero cost - it is non-scarce and non-rivalrous. There is no way of giving away seats at the Olympics for zero cost, because they are scarce, rivalrous resources. The economics are completely different, as any managing director should understand. (Via Peter Murray-Rust.)