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We were pleasantly surprised to read earlier this week about a budget proposal from Texas State Senator Juan Hinojosa.  Hinojosa would like the state of Texas to cut back on the licensing fees necessary to upgrade its personal computers to Windows Vista.  Hinojosa reasons,

“We have a lot of problems with the Vista program. It had a lot of bugs. It takes up a lot of memory. It’s not compatible with other equipment, and it’s supposed to be an upgrade from the XP program that is being used by state agencies, and it’s not.”

Hinojosa’s approach to budgeting on this item reflects the way ordinary, unelected people make decisions about whether or not to make a purchase; he stops and bothers to ask the question:  Is this worth it to me or could I live with something else for less?  Under Hinojosa’s plan, state departments could still get their hands on a license for Vista , but they’d basically need to answer that question in order to obtain approval from the Texas Legislative Budget Board.

We like the spirit of Hinoja’s fiscal restraint.  However, we’d prefer it if Hinoja’s legislation didn’t single out a single vendor for punishment or for reward the way it does with Microsoft.

So, with a 3.7 trillion dollar federal budget threatening on the horizon,we’ve decided to follow Hinoja’s lead with the following two-step summary proposal for any congressman who will listen:

1.  The head of IT for each agency will prepare a plan for migrating existing personal computers to an open-source operating system within the next five years including putting together a disk image and software package and rewriting training manuals to introduce the free open-source operating system.  The plan should minimize the costs of migration and use free open-source tools to accomplish the migration whenever possible.

2.  Any new personal computer purchased by the federal government to replace an existing unit must come pre-installed with a free open-source operating system unless the agency makes a finding showing that a commercial operating system is needed for functionality or security purposes or that it will be more cost-effective to use the commercial software.   The same or a similar test will be necessary for justifying an upgrade of the commercial operating system on any personal computer when a free open-source operating system will run on that computer.

This plan is the result of our own kitchen table brainstorming, but it is based on a concept refined in practice in foreign countries and universities, pushed by conservatives, and recently adopted in the United Kingdom.  Free open-source software has become the solution of choice on the server-side for many of America’s top internet companies including Sun and Amazon.com, and a recent report argues that the federal government could save nearly $4 billion dollars by choosing open source software the way these top private firms do — and potentially over $20 billion by adopting other various computing efficiency strategies used by the open source community.

While that $4 billion dollars might not seem like much in the context of  a $3.7 trillion dollar deficit, you might want to take a spin around Vista, note its eye-catching new interface and new features, but then stop and ask yourself:  Is this really worth a couple billion dollars or could I live with something else for less?