UK Government Solicits Advice On Open Source

Imran Ghory writes: "The UK government has put out a consultation paper on the use of open source software in government,background research into OSS commisioned by the government is also available, including a comparision of OSS office suites." Check out the formats in which the document is available.

Comments

Re:Okay...

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not open formats.

PDF is well understood but PDF now has form input widgets and scripting.

There isn't an open source viewer that can render these.

And using a subset that may be viewed by open source software is the same as using an old version of MS Word '97.

These are not open formats. This government is ignorant of open source - but then I believe that's the point.

Re:Okay...

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

but even more important, there are no alternatives that even have a smidge of mindshare - your only real alternative is plain old text...

Or, um, how about HTML? Which is, after all, the wrapper for the thing anyway...

DOC and PDF are real-world standards. So what?

[Tsar]

Aren't there open-source apps that can read Word documents and PDF files (Ghostscript and StarOffice)?

And more to the point, why should we expect someone presenting an open-source alternative to a predominantly Windows-based audience to present it in non-Windows formats? Are we really that zealous, that we expect organizations to convert completely to open-source alternatives before they can even mention Linux on their website? And didn't we just cover this subject?

I grew up in the rural South, and I remember folk who considered it acceptable to use racial slurs when in a whites-only group, because it was safe to assume that most everyone would agree, and those that didn't would remain silent. Thankfully, times have changed—now I have to read Slashdot to find that kind of intolerance.

If we're going to act like a bunch of militant fundamentalists, I think I might just sit this year out. Please wake me when the zealots stop screaming in the hallway.

Not this again.

[Malcontent]

Nobody has ever sued MS because one of their products was faulty. No software from MS comes with any guarantee of usability whatsoever. If there is a CIO someplace in this world who thinks that they can hold MS accountable then by all means let us know who this collosal idiot is so that we can sell our stocks.

The idea of a CEO or a CIO commiting shareholders money to sue MS because of a defect in one of their software is just too funny. It has never been done and it will never happen.

Please people this kind of fud is old hat and stupid. Think of new ones.

Re:Not this again.

[MrEfficient]

Well, unfortunately it isn't FUD. And it doesn't have anything to do with being able to sue MS. The old saying that nobody ever got fired for choosing MS is sad but true. It's really about job security. If you go with MS products and something screws up and it's an obvious problem with the software, then no one is going to blame you. You don't get fired, and you get to keep your house, dog, car, and wife.

But try something different, and the pressure is on you to make it work. If something goes wrong, it's your fault no matter what. The first thing some people will ask is why you didn't use a MS product. The people who don't like you or your ideas to begin with will come out of the woodwork to lay blame. I've run across this situation many times. If you stick with the status quo, no one will bother you. But if you try to change things, even if it's a good idea, you face an uphill battle. Most people just can't afford to risk their financial security on some type of change. It's an unfortunate reality of the workplace, and if you haven't encountered it, you will. It's a real barrier to innovation.

Re:Not this again.

[BluBrick]

It's about perception of trust. Not litigation.

Senior execs feel that they can trust MS, a large corporate entity that has a proven track record of success.

It's those perceptions that we must change.

Re:Insightful or useless banter?

[Tet]

you'd imagine they would use an open document format.

Care to expand on how PDF isn't an open format? It's fully documented by Adobe in the book "PDF Reference" (ISBN: 0201615886 for the current 1.3 version, or 0201758393 for the soon to be released 1.4 version). It's also available online in various places, for example, http://wotsit.org. Furthermore, several independent implementations of PDF encoders and viewers exist, such as xpdf and ghostscript. Yes, many PDFs include LZW compressed data, but that's a problem with Unisys, not Adobe, and there are non-patent-infringing ways of uncompressing the data anyway. Plus, modern PDFs are compressed with the patent-free deflate algorithm. So exactly how more open do you want PDF to be?

Interesting

[Kirruth]

I think the real message here is that a major Western European government, which is a very large procurer of software, has taken a close look at Free Software. The background document mentioned in the main article is very carefully considered.

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.

My Advice: Go Invisible

[Ars-Fartsica]

Don't start by replacing people's desktop's - go on the server end and let linux shine where is truly can compete with the other solutions out there and demonstrably come out ahead.

Use common sense on the desktop - people can still use Windows and get the power of linux off the server - ssh client tools are available for secure access.

Don't try replacing Windows on the desktop...you will find that the vast majority of people aren't nearly as obsessed with monopoly politics as they are with using their favorite plugins.

Open Systems != Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

The author seems to confuse Open Systems with Open Source. Lock-in to a proprietory vendor only occurs if that vendor uses proprietory standards. There is a world of difference in adopting Solaris and adopting Win32. With Solaris, if you want to move to a new platform in a year, you won't have a problem, because it is based on Open Standards, with win32 you are locked-in.

Microsoft may learn the same lesson that IBM and DEC have learned. Proprietary standards only work when you control the market. Once a contender takes a reasonable bit of market share from you its a fast road to hell. Nobody wants a computer that doesn't integrate well with other computers unless they only have to support only that one type of machine. VAX/VMS was great until people wanted to integrate them with cheap Unix work stations.

Maybe in 2002 people will start to say, Win32 is great but it doesn't integrate too well with our Linux web servers and our Solaris database server.

Re:Okay...

[shepd]

>hat we can tell about this document is that if it contains graphics, it's more than one file

From what I saw, there's no graphics (just plain text).

>and those files will have to be kept together

Operating systems not related to CP/M offer subdirectories for this. :)

>or you can only view it on-line or it's some proprietary format

It isn't viewing online when you have to download the entire file first before you can view it. Word isn't online, and PDF barely manages to be online, but both are pathetic compared to HTML.

>Let's also assume they would not have used HTML coming out of FrontPage or even Word, nothing being "optimized" for one browser or the other.

Any "optimized" HTML becomes an IE document, Netscape document, whatever. It isn't proper HTML if it can't pass the W3C verifier (yep, slashdot doesn't use proper HTML either).

>We also know that it will look different on every browser there is... ...And printing the document is yet another problem

Yup, it would look different on each browser. What's the problem with that? It would also look different when it is printed in different countries! There's no way I could print the british document they way they want me to because in North America (my homeland) we don't use metric paper so I'd have to ruin their "looks the same no matter where you print it" idea anyways.

If you use a page size specific format like word and pdf, you can easily be screwed by page size (same with postscript). HTML formats quite nicely on paper, TYVM. If it doesn't, well, perhaps you aren't using a decent HTML engine? Just a thought...

>if it displays at all.

If it doesn't either your browser is broken or you aren't creating HTML.

With PDF you have to download a 5 MB viewer every year so you can "keep up" with every new version of PDF released. With plain text HTML I can still use mosaic to view files. Now that's backward compatibility that's hard to beat.