Great article! I'm surprised I haven't come across this Royal Commission until now. Unfortunately, a similar Royal Commission today would likely reach the same conclusion: that the current Microsoft monopoly is beneficial to the market.
(Last snapshot of the website before we gave up the domain name - Group was most active the first decade, but before the 20th anniversary had fizzled out)
During that era I found that several government agencies explicitly indicated they wanted to source from sole-source-sole-proprietorship software vendors (some call “proprietary software”), and didn't want the “complexity” of a competitive market for support possible with Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). There were claims about TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) that really only applied if agencies continued to treat FLOSS the same as sole-source software, with policies continuing to treat software as something that is outsourced entirely to large private sector vendors.
In the 1970's when that report was written, software wasn't yet clearly under copyright, so the oligopolies only applied to the hardware. Now that Canada has followed the USA in allowing software patents, software oligopolies are created by government policy via procurement policies, software patents and software copyright. The control of Canadian government by predominantly US entities has continued. Unlike hardware, software is a set of rules that should be seen as a form of policy directly impacting the sovereignty of governments to implement their own policies.
Will Canada follow the EU in trying to establish "sovereignty" with respect to public sector software? For a moment it sounded like the Federal Liberal government intended to pursue this goal.
I pulled up the Treasury Board Secretariat's Directive on Service and Digital (https://www.tbs-sct.canada.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=32601) to see if there was a formal policy shift toward open-source sovereignty. Section 4.3.22 instructs departmental chief information officers to ensure open source software is "encouraged," but stops short of setting a binding procurement mandate or sovereignty framework. While the language supports leveraging community code, federal rules treat open source as a discretionary option rather than an EU-style requirement. The official policy record shows encouragement rather than an enforceable digital sovereignty policy.
Great article! I'm surprised I haven't come across this Royal Commission until now. Unfortunately, a similar Royal Commission today would likely reach the same conclusion: that the current Microsoft monopoly is beneficial to the market.
Typical Canada... "The authors concluded with a warning. A breakup, they argued, would likely hurt the consumer.
Dominion of Canada policies prefer oligopolies over competitive marketplaces.
I hadn't realized that fully until I was active with GOSLING (Getting Open Source Logic INto Government), founded in 2002.
(Some articles from that era that are still partly online)
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/an-open-door-for-open-source-1.810739
https://openhealthnews.com/news-clipping/2012-05-09/open-source-government-can-save-canada-billions-group
(Last snapshot of the website before we gave up the domain name - Group was most active the first decade, but before the 20th anniversary had fizzled out)
https://web.archive.org/web/20221006020517/http://www.goslingcommunity.org/
During that era I found that several government agencies explicitly indicated they wanted to source from sole-source-sole-proprietorship software vendors (some call “proprietary software”), and didn't want the “complexity” of a competitive market for support possible with Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS). There were claims about TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) that really only applied if agencies continued to treat FLOSS the same as sole-source software, with policies continuing to treat software as something that is outsourced entirely to large private sector vendors.
In the 1970's when that report was written, software wasn't yet clearly under copyright, so the oligopolies only applied to the hardware. Now that Canada has followed the USA in allowing software patents, software oligopolies are created by government policy via procurement policies, software patents and software copyright. The control of Canadian government by predominantly US entities has continued. Unlike hardware, software is a set of rules that should be seen as a form of policy directly impacting the sovereignty of governments to implement their own policies.
https://lessig.org/product/codev2/
Will Canada follow the EU in trying to establish "sovereignty" with respect to public sector software? For a moment it sounded like the Federal Liberal government intended to pursue this goal.
I pulled up the Treasury Board Secretariat's Directive on Service and Digital (https://www.tbs-sct.canada.ca/pol/doc-eng.aspx?id=32601) to see if there was a formal policy shift toward open-source sovereignty. Section 4.3.22 instructs departmental chief information officers to ensure open source software is "encouraged," but stops short of setting a binding procurement mandate or sovereignty framework. While the language supports leveraging community code, federal rules treat open source as a discretionary option rather than an EU-style requirement. The official policy record shows encouragement rather than an enforceable digital sovereignty policy.