Slashdot Mirror
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."
And all this despite the good friendship between Bill Gates and Tony Blair
They fell out long ago. Tony expected Bill to provide UK schools with free software back in '97, but it didn't happen. Then he went along to M$ HQ in the UK during the last election, thinking it would be a good photo opportunity, and instead M$ used him to launch the latest Windows XP.
I think Bliar finally got used to the way businesses like M$ work...
Money is indeed a very good reason, or rather, the lack of it. It impels those of us working in UK government departments (or local government, in my case) to adopt free and open source solutions simply so we can do our work effectively. MRTG, Nagios, KiXtart, and SysInternal's PSTools are all tools in my arsenal, and because they were free I just went and used them. No management financial decisions were needed, so a lack of budget couldn't get in the way of us doing our job properly.
The problem is that many in IT in the UK Civil Service (why do thay call it that, it's neither civil nor a service these days?) wear their Microsoft / Oracle / whatever they were brought up on blinkers, and feel / are way out of their depth when it comes to IT which involves more than point and click.
What the Office of Government Commerce is trying to remind Central and Local Government is that their solutions should be cost-effective.
For too long those in central and local government here have have taken tax incomes for granted. It's not like the real world where if you screw up your business goes under. The money flows in no matter how wasteful you are. It's worse than that, actually, for if you do a good job and shrink your expenditure, your budgets get cut, whilst habitual overspenders get their budgets increased. Crazy, huh?
The government's statement is here.
Contrary to the thumbsucking BBC think-piece pointed to, this is not just about Microsoft (although it concerns them, obviously). The UK government has had its fingers burned badly in the last few years over huge IT projects that have gone wrong - the Home Office passports debacle, thanks to Siemens, was just one of them, but there have been others involving EDS and Accenture, all using proprietry software, all costing buckets of cash and all having severe problems with overruns. This has as much to do with trying to avoid those messes than the BBC's "Beast of Redmond" bogey monster.
Some more good news is that the government statement included this comment:
At the same time OGC announced its latest deal on pricing arrangements for Software with IBM. This will offer enhanced discounts across the public sector with additional savings where Linux products are specified.
According to your web site and resume, it appears that you are an independent software engineer, not a representative of government procurement.
So far I am not impressed.
This is not to be unexpected from someone such as yourself, whose career is heavily invested in Microsoft technologies. Your CV even shows that you used to work at Microsoft itself.
However rather than posting vague generalizations about not being impressed, why don't you post what the open source application is that you are testing? Perhaps you could elicit some useful feedback from Slashdot readers to address your concerns as to the "unacceptable risk profile".
Well, ID cards are likely to be dead (makes it too easy to steal identity) but the passport system was built by Siemens.
It's a shame that as one part of the government expands its OSS use, another part Implements the DMCA
When politicians tell me they could simultaneously cut taxes and increase spending on health or transport or whatever - by reducing wasteful and sloppy practices - I believe them. It's when they tell me they will do that I begin to doubt their honesty.