The stock of the common procurement doesn’t run dry when you buy software.
Not since the Bauhaus.
[laughs]
Except they have the same API.
...they’re still bad chairs. [laughs]
That was also because the standard was set by a single vendor. It’s a very old debate.
No. It’s fine.
We do.
It’s a section called intellectual property ownership. We just revamped that section.
Yes. We’re all painfully familiar with this phenomenon.
We’ve been through this many, many times. [laughs]
Down to operating system level.
Yeah, we don’t have spec-free procurements here either.
But I do see your point.
Which is what we’re doing in PDIS.tw.
Well, we have a time frame. We put out a budget. We can still outsource standard-compliant solutions and welcome bidding.
People who come up with WordPress or Drupal in their stacks automatically gets a better seat in the bidding.
Yeah, all of the cost, mostly.
It’s an open alternative to the model of SaaS, basically.
What I’m saying is the development needs to piggyback on subscriptions, because it’s the same cycle. We renew annually. This option is to renew annually, because conceptually it’s the same deliverable.
What we have now is if it’s SaaS, then we call it the cloud procurement, which is the top part.
Which is pay‑on‑use.
No, it’s not.
What I’m saying is that currently in Taiwan’s IT procurement, everything that’s SaaS is counted differently than the spec‑and‑deliver. We’re trying to convert the spec‑and‑deliver line here.
That was the picture, but these are two different terms on the procurement sheet.
The want to sell the data?
OK, maybe not... [laughs]
Yeah...
We’ve been making some changes.
Literally the first thing I did as the Digital Minister is to change the procurement rules.
I’ve been thinking about this for years.
Right, and then we put it up for 60 days of public consultation. I think it’s drawing to a close now. Let’s look at the actual comments. It’s very tricky.
There’s 14 days left. We can’t really do anything before that. I’m sorry that it still says OpenAPI, but it will say common API standards at some point.
This is where the cloud procurement and the spec — or agile — procurement differs.
We don’t have a good story for the latter; this is what all of us are painfully aware of.
You can say, "You must use PostgreSQL," but you must know you want PostgreSQL going in. For many government agencies, this is simply out of their consideration, so they just say, "OK, the web application source code must be open," or something.
Then it ends up paying a lot on Oracle license, which is your classic example.
It’s true. We don’t have a good story here.
It just means you can swap out the top-layer application vendors.
Yes. That means the new vendor must still know Oracle to get the winning bid. Even they get a whole open source, open data system, they must know Oracle.
We haven’t solved that.
However, for the cloud part, this is my main target of this procurement change. First, it’s software‑as‑a‑service, but we’re insisting now running on local infrastructure.
That actually rules out pretty much everybody who relies on this sticky lock-in. Even if they say it’s proprietary software, it still has to run on the data center here.
We do it not for data localization purposes, but really for know‑how localization, so that people can locally inspect what’s going on.
As you probably are aware, if they use Oracle and the Oracle Access Manager’s stored procedures, a lot of the procedures is plain text. It’s not binaries.
Even if we don’t manage to convince to get the entire lower stack binaries to convert to open software, you can still inspect pretty much everything, during a running system, to figure out how it’s working.
We can measure that for cloud procurements.
There’s a part in the Digital Nation Plan that develops automated tools to look at all the source code and binaries that a bidding vendor submits, and then try to figure out, first, how much of it is open licensed, how much of it is Creative Commons license, which may not be open, by the way.
Well, even if it’s CC‑ND, we want to know its license.
Yeah. Technically it’s "free culture license" if we are talking in a CC way.
