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

The real reason...

[arth1]

The real reason is probably simple: Money
Not money as in saving by using open source, but saving money as in getting Microsoft and other vendors to drop their pants, because open source is considered, and acknowledged as a competitor.

Regards,
--
*Art

Re:The real reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Blair != Govenment

[Captain Kirk]

Tony Blair may be pro-Microsoft but each department has its own budget and makes its own IT decisions. I've seen invitations to tender that specifically require programs to be COM based which makes it a MS easy win. Others require that the supplier have reference sites in the Government already (easy for EDS and Accenture) while others look for a fit with existing Linux/Apache skills. Tony Blair loves Microsoft but open source is alive and well in the UK public services.

One step forward for RMS' goals

[Pflipp]

While "we" are all making fun of mr. Stallman, his original idea (to create a user base for Free Software as to ultimately create a legal platform and status for it) is finally seeing the first tiny steps towards a result; recognition by governments is a good first. This should also (partially) explain his hammering on the GNU brand, as to promote the ideas behind the project on moments as these. You never know what they'll pick up in new legislation just because they've heard of it and find some kind of sense in it.

Now of course this post seems like an open invitation to start another pro-/ anti-RMS GNU vs. BSD bash riot on Slashdot, but I honestly believe that most of that has been said before (duh!). All I wanted to do is put this single point of credit towards mr. Stallman, independent of any other credits he should or should not deserve in your eyes. (Let's see if this keeps you from throwing some old mud on Slashdot...)

Manuals

[skinfitz]

This could be a major boon for tech manual writers - you know governments - like everything documented (well - supposed to anyway).

Tons of OSS stuff is severely lacking in the documentation department - if enough governments take it up then it could create a nice tech manual industry.

Tony and Bill

[infradead]

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...

Blair and Microsoft

[panurge]

Blair is a lawyer (IDS mispronounces it "liar" in his peculiar accent, but that's what he means.) He also left legal practice well before UK lawyers decided that computers were OK, in about 2000. That means that the full extent of his knowledge about IT is:

• Lower class people like secretaries and clerks use computers
• Some of the people who have something to do with them, like Mr. Gates, apparently have lots of money and should be kept onside.

I imagine if the thinks about it at all, he now thinks that computers are a matter for the civil service. The person who matters is Gordon Brown at the Treasury, a man who famously used to phone journalists up at 10pm because of something interesting he had worked out from a spreadsheet. And his approach could be summarised very briefly as:

• Will this work?
• Will this save money?
• Will this affect UK jobs?

The people to convince about FOSS are in the Treasury, and as they tend to be the smartest people in the UK government, there may be some chance of making it work.

What a travesty!

[An Anonymous Hero]

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."

So the whole investigation is being run in .doc format?!? Obviously, the dice are loaded.

I can see it coming. "Linux has GNUs", "ready to launch in under 45 minutes", blah, blah.

This is not just about MS

[dipfan]

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.

As a UK local government councillor ...

[Tim Ward]

... I am involved in procurement. We are currently looking at an open source solution for a particular application (well, not completely open source, the back end is Oracle).

So far I am not impressed.

I'm not unimpressed witht the software; the difficulty is in getting a handle on what the software can and can't do and confidence that what it can't do will be fixed.

When you're buying commercial software you get some or all of

• a visit from a salesman
• product brochures
• a demonstration from an expert in the product
• documentation
• comprehensive on line help
• a road map or new features release plan
• clarity as to what you do and don't get in the support contract

and so on.

With this open source offering we appear to be getting few or none of the above: "here's the URL for the demo system, go and play with it". Um yes. Thanks. Not, I fear, a basis on which a public authority can spend lots of tax payers' money on a service for tax payers.

Whilst it seems entirely possible that the open source offering is well designed to meet our needs it also seems entirely possible that it will be unable to demonstrate this to an acceptable risk profile so we'll have to buy something else. The competitors, as usual, include paying for a managed service elsewhere or buying commercial software.

Re:And...?

[Talthane]

Government (central and local) in the UK is very focused on process rather than delivery - partly because of scandals, partly because we have very tight auditing mechanisms. It's the reason that IT projects by government often come to nothing, incidentally. But the point of the project is that local authorities and central government departments will adopt nothing unless they're certain it's been tested and validated by someone who has some kind of authority. That authority used to be the US government, but things are changing and now the UK government has its own agenda - a Good Thing.

Invite the author for a visit...

[Corpus_Callosum]

When you're buying commercial software you get some or all of....

Go to the URL, find the name and email of the primary author of the software and send him an email. In your email, explain the situation and invite him for a consultation. Offer to pay airfare and expenses and, perhaps, a small consulting fee for the day. Your total expense for this will be insignificant compared to the procurement costs for commercial software.

What you will find is that the person who shows up is an absolute expert in the software (he wrote it), will be happy to work for you as a consultant making your improvements and bugfixes (guaranteed to be competent, since he wrote it) and will probably leave you on that day with a fully operational and configured system at your location, for the cost of his visit.

If you would prefer power-point presentations from a salesman who probably has never really used the software that he is selling outside of presentation environments to be followed by incredibly high licensing costs, delays and lock-in consultants at outrageous prices that cannot even modify the software that you bought, take the proprietary course that you mentioned.

But I sincerely hope, for your sake, that you will give my suggestion a "go around". ;-)