UK Gov't Solicits Comments On OSS Policy

sufehmi writes "The UK government is asking for comments on its Open Source Software (OSS) policy document. This may have a great effect on OSS usage in UK gov, so don't miss this - get your voice heard. Also what would you say to your government about this topic ? Let's share your thoughts with others here."

Comments

Comments on Document Intro.

[sepluv]

Here's my quicky-written in-depth textual analysis of page 1 (the intro.). I'm glad they are taking notice of the pressure us, UK free-software users are putting on them, but, let's say, it doesn't look as great as it could be though. Disclaimer: maybe I'm very cynical and I am in a pissed off mood about just talking to the powers at be at my central-government-funded college who think that free software "is evil hacking [sic] tools like Kazaa" and who worships MS -- only using MS software were possible.

"Open Source Software (OSS) is software whose source code is openly published"

This is exactly why (as I said in my last post) it should be about free software. They obviously think they any software with source is open source as opposed to only stuff that fits the Debian Free Software Guidelines, OSI open source definition or the FSF free software definition.

"is usually available at no charge"

But they still seem to think that it is about cost not freedom (even though they use the term, open source, which was apparently designed to remove perceived ambiguity with the term free software -- I personally think free software is a clearer term). Cost hardly matters to governments anyway -- they get very good deals -- the fact that MS has control over the government's computer systems and all the personal data of UK citzens, and that no one can see what the software is doing is *far* more important.

"under a licence defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) which prevents it from being redistributed under a more restrictive licence."

AFAIK the OSI have not made under any software licenses. Also, I believe, at least three-quaters of software is licesed under the FSF's GNU GPL. If the are talking about the GNU GPL, the GPL does not "[prevent] it from being redistributed under a more restrictive licence" -- the author can distribute it under any license -- it does prevent a *derivative* work from being licensed under a more restrictive license (unless all the orignal authors have seperately licensed the software under a more restrictive license).

"It has leapt to prominence by starting to take a significant market share in some specific parts of the software infrastructure market."

So, they are saying that they now like FOSS because it may have a monopoly in some areas -- I'm not sure which ones they are refering to -- servers?

OK, fine they actually think the government should go out of their way to support monopolies and lack of freedom, then? I can see why most desktop PC's in the UK gov. run MSW then, if they have that attitude.

"to live up to their initial press hype. OSS is indeed the start of a fundamental change in the software infrastructure marketplace, but it
is not a hype bubble that will burst and UK Government must take cognisance of that fact."

Do they have a guilty concious about being a gov. who are very into creating and blindly following hype bubbles or sthg? Seriously though, it seems they have (after the years of campaigning that free-software advocates by those at the UK AFFS, FSF, &c.) finally realised that free software is an important and fundamental change (or actually return to the old days) in the way we look at software (esp. in gov.).

"The Action Plan (June 2002) for the European Commission's initiative
eEurope 2005: An Information Society for all builds on the previous Action
Plan (June 2000) which set the target "to promote the use of open source
software in the public sector and e-Government best practice through
exchange of experiences across the Union"."

So it seems that they are making another action plan as part of their previous action plan on which they haven't done anything yet but produce another action plan. Oh, and they are only doing it because the EU (who I think are more free-software friendly thanks to FSF Europe bringing them over) forced them. My experience is that the only way to get the UK government to do anything for their citizens (as oppose