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This is about Linux on the desktop. Newham are (for example) already running their website (and intranet) on RedHat CCM (APLAWS) on Linux.

I believe Newham's IT Director is an OSS fan. Linux on the desktop across an organisation is still pretty radical; one of the main drivers is security. Newham have been sold the idea by the great Eddie Bleasdale (UK 30-year I.T. veteran and Linux evangelist) of Netproject, who have also sold it to South Yorkshire Police. Netproject is a 2 and a half man outfit taking on Microsoft and doing a lot of damage. M$ response to South Yorkshire was deep discounts.

So, unless M$ have an in with someone higher up than the I.T. director, it's not clear this audit will achieve its goals.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Newham or Netproject.

Not sure why he didn't specify the exact software, legal reasons I guess. I'm not so circumspect, so here's the link aplaws I'm 99% sure that's the package.

I work for a UK local council (I am more circumspect about specifying which one tho :) ). The chances of getting any open source software in there are miniscule (although I'll try if I see the opportunity). We're 100% M$, can't even get on the network without having Office start-up enabled, severely limiting me from getting a linux box on the network and prototyping.

As for the aplaws project I had a quick look at that a while back, and I agree with the original poster. The things that initially occurred to me was that there seems no real direction for the project, no point of contact to find out more, no firm plan outlined for the future. Have a look at the message board on there.

Parts of the the higher levels of government and have the right ideas, but for it to filter down to the people that matter in the councils is going to be a long process. The philosophy behind open source parallels that of government. Made by the people for the people. Giving the individual as much as possible for the lowest possible cost. We all know what M$'s philosophy is, which is why I believe governments should push towards using more open source.

ArsDigita never made "Open"ACS. ArsDigita created ACS as an open source toolkit supporting the Oracle database. The OpenACS project came about when ArsDigita decided to make their Java project which is what has become Redhat CCM.

This is true. In fact, ArsDigita's new VC-installed managers decided the original ACS, written in TCL, wasn't buzzword-compliant enough, so they had the whole thing rewritten in Java. But in fact the Java version was never really finished when ArsDigita went under.

Red Hat purchased all of ArsDigita's assets and this project belongs entirely to them now.

Yeah, right. More like Redhat, out of the goodness of their hearts, gave jobs to a few ArsDigita programmers, and allowed them to continue working on ACS/Java, now called CCM. This also let ArsDigita's management save face, by allowing them to say they "sold the remaining assets" to Redhat. In fact, there was nothing left. ArsDigita had been run completely into the ground.

CCM did/does have promise. Its development has continued, albeit slowly, by both Redhat and some third party developers. I believe it's also open source, as is the Postgres variant it works with. One implementation that's been around awhile is the Aplaws project, a portal/intranet app for governments and municipalities in the UK.

UK local authorites, via the Accessible and Personalised Local Authority Websites.

This is a web toolkit based on the Arsdigita (of Phil Greenspun fame) Community system.

Their setup is *nix, Apache, Tomcat/Resin and Oracle.

Sorry. Still asleep. Try:

http://www.aplaws.org.uk

Picking up on your why the hell wasn't all of that software open-sourced so that the state and city governments could have used it, the UK can point to a (first?) example of this - a GPL'd content management system for local government:

http://www.aplaws.org.uk/