The other contested point is the so-called uninformed use outside its original collective purpose.
There’s a few issues in the new privacy law for us. The old contested issue, when we had that debate, was on health and other sensitive information. There was a section in the privacy law that required a much more strict measurement of the data protection endeavors. Criteria for this ...
OK. We do have a data protection law here. It was largely outlined after the previous EU data privacy law. It is inherently pretty compatible with the new directive improved by the Article 29 Working Party.
I’ll be recording this. Is this OK with you?
...is compatible with everything.
We do CC0 here.
Yup.
He likes and he re‑Tweets. Now I know this.
Everybody can Tweet at @rufuspollock.
You want a curve like a flipped power-law graph.
Got it.
The hard part is to tie this training budget with the cloud usage numbers. Currently in the Digital Nation Plan, these are completely different funds. This is for the enrichment of the community, and this is for reducing the licensing costs. We’re doing both, but not as the same project.
Then we want this many people empowered over four years. That’s part of the Digital Nation Plan. It’s in it already.
You see the lines of code that use Docker, for example. Then we say, "OK, it’s important to have the local Docker community that is able to maintain this kind of thing." Then we grade people with three, maybe four levels, like being able to install and use it, maybe ...
The other easy part is to get the local talents and everybody trained to specific technologies...we count them as common things in the stacks, like Tensorflow, OpenStack, maybe Docker or something. Then we say, "OK, so for these critical parts of the infrastructure, since all the procurements..."
In any case, what I’m saying is that we are, as part of the Digital Nation Plan, developing this automated assessment tool, so we can get some useful numbers out of it. A breakdown of all the licenses, count of lines, and so on.
Saying "open software" doesn’t cover the whole of it, the non-software parts.
I’m aware of that. I’m just saying there’s non‑code part, too.
Yeah. Technically it’s "free culture license" if we are talking in a CC way.
Well, even if it’s CC‑ND, we want to know its license.
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 ...
We can measure that for cloud procurements.
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.
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.
We do it not for data localization purposes, but really for know‑how localization, so that people can locally inspect what’s going on.
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.
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.
We haven’t solved that.
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.
It just means you can swap out the top-layer application vendors.
It’s true. We don’t have a good story here.
Then it ends up paying a lot on Oracle license, which is your classic example.
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.
We don’t have a good story for the latter; this is what all of us are painfully aware of.
This is where the cloud procurement and the spec — or agile — procurement differs.
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.
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.
I’ve been thinking about this for years.
Literally the first thing I did as the Digital Minister is to change the procurement rules.
We’ve been making some changes.
Yeah...
OK, maybe not... [laughs]
The want to sell the data?
That was the picture, but these are two different terms on the procurement sheet.
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.
No, it’s not.
Which is pay‑on‑use.
What we have now is if it’s SaaS, then we call it the cloud procurement, which is the top part.
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.
It’s an open alternative to the model of SaaS, basically.
