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UK Sets Open Source Procurement Policy
An anonymous submitter notes a story in the Register about the UK publishing their policy on the use of Open Source software. (Or skip straight to the policy itself.) The UK has been moving towards this for a while, and while they don't rule out using proprietary code, the policy definitely recognizes the benefits of OSS.
You are 100% correct. For the desktop user, the TCO is just too high. But that's OK, because I personally don't think that it is ready for the desktop yet. It is too hard to exchange documents with Office users, the available web browsers have problems with some content (yes I know that is the designers fault, but it remains a problem nonetheless), and it's just too damn technical for sales/accounting/management types to handle. Hopefully that will change. But for now, I'm very happy to see linux making good progress in an area that it is very strong.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
the available web browsers have problems with some content
I'm glad to hear somebody phrase it in those terms. I've long been of the opinion that the web content standards body is largely irrelevant; IE's dialect of HTML is the de facto standard, for better or worse, and when a browser fails to render a page the way IE does, unless there's a really great reason for it, it's the browser's fault.
Standards are all fine and good, but only to the extent that they're used in the real world. There's nothing more useless than an un-adopted standard.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled topic, already in progress.