UK Gov't Considers Expanding Open Source Use

IonPanel writes "BBC have a story about the use of open source software at the heart of British government policy. The UK government is now running trials at both government and local level, citing the world-wide effort of a community of programmers fixing bugs and free upgrades as the reason. And all this despite the good friendship between Bill Gates and Tony Blair. There will be quite a few worried faces at Microsoft over the next few months ... Lets hope it's another Munich!" The experiments -- a joint effort with IBM, run by the Office of the E-envoy -- will "cover a range of departments, from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister to the e-envoy's office itself."

Comments

Note that the BLIAR is missing in the list

[arivanov]

Office of the Deputy Prime Minister

Note this.

I am betting a case of beer that the BLIAR will once again suck up to Bill and open his election campaign at the MSFT UK headquaters near Reading as he did in the last elections.

I am betting ten cases of beer that this will not get anywhere. You do not expect anything but MSFT to go around in a country where the prime minister prefers to open his campaing at MSFT headquarters instead of any members of the FTSE 100 list.

Re:One step forward for RMS' goals

[radsoft]

Funny you don't mention Linus a single time. Linux is what is on the move - not RMS. And what's this 'GNU vs. BSD'? It's LINUX - it's not GNU/Linux and it's not GNU. And that's what Linus said, and he's the man behind it - not RMS. Bash riots? It's over. No one dislikes Linus, and no one likes RMS, and we can all go home. Even YOU.