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unfortunately, you needed to do a more advanced economics course. There is far, far more to government take-up of OSS than free linux.

Recently Newham Borough Council, one of 9 government supported councils trialling OSS, scrapped its plans to migrate due to overall cost.

Read about it here

There's far more to do that just give Linux and OpenOffice away for free. Lower cost does involve more than free licences for a desktop.

They are Royal Liver - see this report

oops, pressed the wrong button...

Anyway Scott has had a lot of interesting things to say recently including saying of the IT industry "We're down to three - IBM, Microsoft, and Sun. The rest is collateral damage.", of the M$ top brass "Ballmer and Gates are drop outs" and of Redhat "With Red Hat you get the kernel. With Sun you get the application server". Last time I checked Redhat is a little more than that.

I was thinking could all this big talking be a McBride like attempt to raise the stock price of his new 1.5 million shares? Or am I jumping to conclusions because their names both begin with Mc?

Tom.

McBride claimed that SCO has the right to audit IBM's customers. "We have other rights under the contract we are looking at. For example, we can audit IBM customers. SCO has audit rights on its customers," he said.

" you simply take the copies of AIX that are out there and send them back to us, or you destroy them and give us notice of the date of destruction. It calls for that in the contract to certify that destruction has taken place."

SCO have been bleating elsewhere about how IBM hasn't filed for summary dissmissal. And it's odd. I am seriously underwhelmed by the IBM response. If SCO are so in the wrong, IBM could have come out more aggressivly on this, or even counter-sued by now. That they haven't is a bad sign.

I actually thought the other SCO news today was more interesting: SCO may audit IBM AIX customers.

How do SCO want to use the discovery process> Darl said: "We get to really shake things up". I don't know what was in Darl's mind when he said that, but I assumed (I'm not a lawyer though!) that discovery was supposed to be about collecting evidence not shaking up IBM's customers. I'm also unclear (the sentence doesn't parse) what Darl means by using discovery as a "vehicle" - again I thought discovery was supposed to be about collecting evidence prior to the case, not used for some other purpose. Anybody care to comment??

There are also some more Darl (longer quotes in more context) on the same subject here.

One of the other attractions to government is that such a system provides a national identity database such as which doesn't currently exist. I work for a company that is shortly to go live with a project for the UK Passport Office which will provide electoral registration information to support passport applications. In time this information will be extended to other government bodies which would not be able to share it between each other, so it's going to happen anyway.

As for biometric testing, the UK Goverment's approved suppliers are almost all terrible at what they do: congestion charging is about to be introduced in Central London and relies on a system that can read car number plates. Capita, the contractor who were hired to develop the system, managed to get it to read one in early December. It goes live in a fortnight, and it's currently 4/1 that it will be abandoned before the end of the year. Other companies such as EDS, Siemens and Schlumberger Sema will be in the running to manage the system. A search of The Register or Computing magazine's news pages will show that these are not companies to whom you would entrust your identity, biometrics or no.