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The UK Government policy on open source software says:

Security of government systems is vital. Properly configured OSS can be at least as secure as proprietary systems and OSS is currently subject to fewer Internet attacks. A balance needs to be struck between the availability of security administration skills and the advantages of many diverse systems.

http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/documents/oss_policy_version2.pdf

This 2001 Qnetic report for the UK gov.
http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/documents/QinetiQ_OSS_re p.pdf

Makes this claim : "There are about 60,000 viruses known for Windows, 40 or so for the Macintosh, about 5 for
commercial Unix versions and perhaps 40 for Linux."

But viruses, by definition, will always have a hard time in Lunix. People generally don't share executables. Which leaves auto-opening files such as image preview, pdf, html and openoffice docs etc.etc.

It generally easier to exploit internet facing services such as DNS, HTTP, SMTP etc.

I've started to run into this problem myself from using del.icio.us as my primary bookmark source. One of my current issues is not what tags other people are using, but what tags I am using. Currently I have a lot of overlapping tags. I did some cleanup lately so that 'photos' and 'photo' are in a single tag, etc.

I started to look around and found there have been a lot of standardizations of topic maps. Although intended more for very large systems (think government sized systems categorizing millions of documents). The UK government has a topic system called the e-Government Metadata Standard (e-GMS). The schema is browsable online. Another good article is The TAO of Topic Maps (also in pdf)

I think there should be a basic standard to avoid situations like the photo/photos tags above. But I think that should be as far as it goes. The good thing about tagging on most sites is you are not limited. The bad thing about tagging on most sites is you are not limited.

Whether it's one or both sides of a street will vary from place to place. It would typically cover the entirety of a small cul-de-sac, for example. Every place in a single postcode will be on the same delivery route, (but there might be multiple postcodes in any given route, because that;s urely an operational matter).

Here's the official Post Code standard. Not terribly exciting, but what the hell...
http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/gdsc/html/frames/PostCod e-2-1-Release.htm

That's as well as Full Name and Requested Name fields.

That's as well as Full Name and Requested Name fields.

This is completely offtopic, but dont mod me down because it is in some way related (at least in the UK)

I tried to post this article but for some reason it was rejected in favor a completely pointless article about firewire and video cameras!

Anyhow it is important and should have been accepted!

to briefly put it;

Anyone here interested in Open Source, and supporting it in UK
government should digest this document and send your support/comments/insight

heres the link with downloads and stuff.

Its an important document and those here interested should read it and post related comments/ suggestions to the email address on that page.

What they are seeking to do is support evaluate both Open Source and Proprietary solutions; whilst doing their utmost to avoid vendor lock-in ; as is the case with Microsoft bundling IE & WMP (etc) with windows.

The document is an Open Draft, that means that right now it is not set in stone, and liable for change. If anyone here reads it and thinks it should be changed in anyway I would advise letting them know.

The UK government already allow you to submit your tax return in an XML document. Some information about the schema and the like are on GovTalk Last year I used the free TaxCalc Lite to submit my tax return. If you take a look at the files installed by the application you'll see that it is composed almost entirely from XML & XSLT documents. A related example is the German Home Banking Computer Interface supported by GnuCash

This has been driven by the EU recommendation to consider open source mentioned in the past on Slashdot.

Main body are these recommendations:

• UK Government will consider OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements. Contracts will be awarded on a value for money basis.
• UK Government will only use products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments.
• UK Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services.
• UK Government will obtain full rights to bespoke software code that it procures and all customisations of COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) packages that it uses wherever this achieves value for money.
• UK Government will explore further the possibilities of using OSS as the default exploitation route for Government funded R&D software by academic research institutes

BTW: PLEASE DON'T SEND COMMENTS TO GOVTALK if you are just going to say 'me too'. The 7 comments that are there are all pro-open source and we dont want to sound like fanatics, do we? Remember how a lot of the comments to the EU on patent law were essentially ignored for this reason - don't duplicate the arguments of others.

Disclaimer: I don't work for the UK government, but I write software that gets sold to them. Which includes a lot of open source stuff. I just happened to be reading that policy today before I read /. ...

Cheers, Baz

This has been driven by the EU recommendation to consider open source mentioned in the past on Slashdot.

Main body are these recommendations:

• UK Government will consider OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements. Contracts will be awarded on a value for money basis.
• UK Government will only use products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments.
• UK Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services.
• UK Government will obtain full rights to bespoke software code that it procures and all customisations of COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) packages that it uses wherever this achieves value for money.
• UK Government will explore further the possibilities of using OSS as the default exploitation route for Government funded R&D software by academic research institutes

BTW: PLEASE DON'T SEND COMMENTS TO GOVTALK if you are just going to say 'me too'. The 7 comments that are there are all pro-open source and we dont want to sound like fanatics, do we? Remember how a lot of the comments to the EU on patent law were essentially ignored for this reason - don't duplicate the arguments of others.

Disclaimer: I don't work for the UK government, but I write software that gets sold to them. Which includes a lot of open source stuff. I just happened to be reading that policy today before I read /. ...

Cheers, Baz

http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/rfc/rfc_document.asp?doc num=429

For those in Europe note the link to the E-Europescheme.

Sorting out an electronic infrastructure sounds like a real nightmare when your dealing with 317 million people.

Also, as another piece of trivia; the US Navy have well high end documented uses, but the USN PSA in San Diego uses Linux for personel support.

I have personally seen it in several places , it's out there but the tech-guys often don't shout about it. I don't know why, whether it is internal pressure, or commercial pressure or interoperability between departments.

QinetiQ the UK's commercial wing of DERA (Defense Evaluation and Research Agency) produced this report: QinetiQ_OSS_rep.pdf. Which is the most pro-OSS report I've read.

The German Government support GnuPG and a few other security related projects.

And of course the NSA have SE-Linux, and have put money into research at the university of Utah.

LANL have some pretty serious Linux clustering.

My comments from another board forum
--

" ... Now y'all can start a flamewar on which of the BSD or GPL
philosophies is more 'communist....."

Neither are!

Communism - 1) a theory or system of social organization based on the
holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to
the community as a whole or to the state. 2) a system of social
organization in which all economic and social activityis controlled by a
totalitarian state dominated by a single and self-perpetuating political
party. 3) the principles and practices of the Communist party.
4) communialism.

Communisim is a combination of a totalitarian governing body and a
socialistic economic system.

Totalitarianism - 1) the practice and principles of a totalitarian
regrime: the totalitiarism of Nazi Germany. 2) absolute control by the
state or a governing branch of a highly centralized institution:
Totalitarianism aims at suppressing initiative as well as individualism.
3) The character of quality of an autocratic or authoritarian individual,
group, government, or state: the totalitiarism of the father in their
patriachal household.

Socialism - 1) Theory or system of social organization that advocates the
ownership and control of industry, capital, land, etc., by the community
as a whole. 2) Procedure or practice in accordance with this theory.
3)(in Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of
a society to communism.

there is also:

Commonwealth (much of the definition refers to non-communist states or
collections of, such as the British Commonwealth of Nations, and the
Commonwealth of Austrialia, to even the how it referes to use in US
history.)

But then there is this in the definition: 7) any group of persons united
by some common interest. 9) a state in which the supreme power is held by
the people.

And then there is this which gives a very good overview of what Open
Source Software is: QonetiQ
- Analysis of th eImpact of Open Source Software

There are some business practices going on in the computer industry that
far better fits the definition of communism than what OSS does.

It is also worth noting the standing question as to why some persist with
such disortions of the truth. (Could that be classified as "Gatesism"?)

This contains the following unattributed estimate for the Linux userbase:

The user base of Linux is estimated to have grown as follows: - 1993 - 100,000, 1994 - 500,000, 1995 - 1,500,000, 1996 - 3,500,000, to a current figure well in excess of 15 million.

Does anybody have any idea where the author might have obtained those estimates?

Of particular interest is the recommendation that if there is a value case, government departments should be free to go with Free Software (as opposed to being tied to software from "real companies"). This hard-headed value-for-money analysis the only way to check the political and marketing muscle of the software corps. The truth is that much of the corporately-developed software available offers very little additional value over the corresponding open source equivalent.

Banging the drum for Open Source is great, but it's when procurers say, "show me the added value or give me a discount", that people like Microsoft pay attention.

I'd commend a read of the cited QinetiQ Report cited as background to the current consultation. In fact, I'm quite shocked at how well considered it is; I'm sure it will help readers seeking to convince their management to consider the adoption of OSS.

Its more than easy to diss Govtalk for its many failings - such as the failure to embrace text and RTF when it has the opportunity; hotchingly bad HTML on the website, &c.

But there's a great deal of good going on, too; not least the RFC process of which this consultation is a part; and the strong support for XML in the eGovernment Interoperability framework (itself a coherent position statement).

As food for further debate, here are the main recommendations under which the current consultation was predicated:

1. OSS is indeed the start of a fundamental change in the software infrastructure marketplace, and is not a hype bubble that will burst.
2. Within five years, 50% of the volume of the software infrastructure market could be taken by OSS.
3. OSS's position in large servers (e.g. those managing massive multi-user databases), such as those that underpin many large Government procurements, will grow from its current position of near zero penetration, to a position where OSS is a viable option, within 2 - 3 years.
4. Within the developed world, we as yet see no sign that OSS will become a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows, for user's (general purpose) desktop machines in the corporate or home PC markets. However, OSS on the desktop may soon become a significant player in the developing world. For these reasons we recommend against any preference for OSS on the desktop, but also recommend that this issue be reassessed by the end of 2002, by which time early trials of the use of OSS desktops may have generated sufficient evidence to warrant a reassessment.
5. We see no benefit that the Government would gain from expressing a general preference for OSS within server infrastructures.
6. The Government could clarify its position as to whether there are circumstances in which Microsoft products are to be preferred.
7. The Government could consider publishing policy as to how the risk of lock-in to proprietary protocols is to be managed.
8. As yet it is not possible to predict that OSS will make a major contribution to the software applications market.
9. Many of the Government's risks that arise from over-dependence on proprietary protocols and data formats for interoperability can be controlled by the selective use of open data standards.
10. The existence of an OSS reference implementation of a data standard has often accelerated the adoption of such standards, and we recommend that the Government consider selective sponsorship of OSS reference implementations.
11. The rise of OSS, offers the possibility that non-US players will find it easier to influence the future direction of IT infrastructure technology.
12. The Government should consider using OSS as the default exploitation route for UK Government funded software.
13. The differences between OSS and proprietary software are not a major factor in either improving or degrading the vulnerability of a nation's IT infrastructure.
14. We recommend that the Government obtain full rights to bespoke software that it procures - this includes any customisation of off-the-shelf software packages.
15. The Open Source model offers a new paradigm for funding software in communities-of-interest (e.g. Health and Education). The Government could consider running pilot projects to test the viability of the OSS approach to such software.
16. We recommend that the Medical Records data standard be examined by appropriate domain experts for possible inclusion in the e-GIF.

I'd commend a read of the cited QinetiQ Report cited as background to the current consultation. In fact, I'm quite shocked at how well considered it is; I'm sure it will help readers seeking to convince their management to consider the adoption of OSS.

Its more than easy to diss Govtalk for its many failings - such as the failure to embrace text and RTF when it has the opportunity; hotchingly bad HTML on the website, &c.

But there's a great deal of good going on, too; not least the RFC process of which this consultation is a part; and the strong support for XML in the eGovernment Interoperability framework (itself a coherent position statement).

As food for further debate, here are the main recommendations under which the current consultation was predicated:

1. OSS is indeed the start of a fundamental change in the software infrastructure marketplace, and is not a hype bubble that will burst.
2. Within five years, 50% of the volume of the software infrastructure market could be taken by OSS.
3. OSS's position in large servers (e.g. those managing massive multi-user databases), such as those that underpin many large Government procurements, will grow from its current position of near zero penetration, to a position where OSS is a viable option, within 2 - 3 years.
4. Within the developed world, we as yet see no sign that OSS will become a viable alternative to Microsoft Windows, for user's (general purpose) desktop machines in the corporate or home PC markets. However, OSS on the desktop may soon become a significant player in the developing world. For these reasons we recommend against any preference for OSS on the desktop, but also recommend that this issue be reassessed by the end of 2002, by which time early trials of the use of OSS desktops may have generated sufficient evidence to warrant a reassessment.
5. We see no benefit that the Government would gain from expressing a general preference for OSS within server infrastructures.
6. The Government could clarify its position as to whether there are circumstances in which Microsoft products are to be preferred.
7. The Government could consider publishing policy as to how the risk of lock-in to proprietary protocols is to be managed.
8. As yet it is not possible to predict that OSS will make a major contribution to the software applications market.
9. Many of the Government's risks that arise from over-dependence on proprietary protocols and data formats for interoperability can be controlled by the selective use of open data standards.
10. The existence of an OSS reference implementation of a data standard has often accelerated the adoption of such standards, and we recommend that the Government consider selective sponsorship of OSS reference implementations.
11. The rise of OSS, offers the possibility that non-US players will find it easier to influence the future direction of IT infrastructure technology.
12. The Government should consider using OSS as the default exploitation route for UK Government funded software.
13. The differences between OSS and proprietary software are not a major factor in either improving or degrading the vulnerability of a nation's IT infrastructure.
14. We recommend that the Government obtain full rights to bespoke software that it procures - this includes any customisation of off-the-shelf software packages.
15. The Open Source model offers a new paradigm for funding software in communities-of-interest (e.g. Health and Education). The Government could consider running pilot projects to test the viability of the OSS approach to such software.
16. We recommend that the Medical Records data standard be examined by appropriate domain experts for possible inclusion in the e-GIF.