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UK Conservatives Slammed Over Open Source Stance

Posted by timothy on from the fully-support-my-party's-stance-on-the-issue dept.

Golygydd Max writes "The UK government has been criticised by the opposition Conservative (Tory) party for its lack of support for open-source software. Now, according to Techworld, a security company that has examined the Tory plans has come out against the use of open source software, citing the number of security problems inherent in the software. This is a sensitive issue for the UK government, still smarting from the loss of 7m family records from HM Revenue and Customs in 2007. What makes this criticism interesting is that this is an attack on the policies of what will certainly be the next British government — it's unusual for a party to be criticised like this before it comes to office. It's an indication of how IT is going to be a battleground in the future general election."

11 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmmm.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    > it's unusual for a party to be criticised like this before it comes to office

    Clearly timothy is unfamiliar with UK politics.

    1. Re:Hmmmm.... by Xest · · Score: 5, Interesting

      > It's an indication of how IT is going to be a battleground in the future general election.

      Indeed Mr AC, you're right.

      The UK doesn't have battleground issues in politics like the US, the UK is plagued with football team style voting, most of Yorkshire will vote Labour, most of London will vote Conservatives, the rest of the country will vote one or the other depending with a few Lib Dem pockets (Sheffield, Cambridge) littered in between.

      It doesn't matter what their policies are, people don't care about that, the people in Yorkshire (disclaimer: that's where I live) will as always go on about how Thatcher ate their babies in the 70s/80s and so vote Labour, the people in rich areas will go on about how Labour caused a big recession in the 70s and vote Conservatives and the few parts of the country capable of intelligent, dynamic thought will actually vote for the party that actually fits their political hopes best.

      People here rarely seem to vote on the merit of a party's politics or agenda but instead based on whatever x party did 20 to 40 years ago and those that weren't around then still vote on what party x did 20 to 40 years ago because their parents have whined to them all their lives about how hard party x made life for them all that time ago.

      I think part the problem is that in the UK we get no political education whatsoever, kids grow up without a clue as to what left wing and right wing are, what the different flavours of conservatism for example are, what liberalism and libertarian are and where our parties sit in these areas. We're never taught the importance of voting, or how our vote can effect the outcome of an election, hell most people don't even know what the house of Lords is, they think parliament is one big single chamber of sheer boredom. I find this quite shocking, because whilst I can see the merit in music class, religious education, art and so on I really do think politics is perhaps more important, yet oddly entirely neglected. I could quite happy have lived without the hour a week spent in music class, or the 2 to 3 hours spent on English literature (although language is of course important), I understand some people do want to know this, but it should've been optional whereas I'm not convinced politics should be. We already have history lessons to teach us about our and the world's past so I simply cannot see what is more important about analyzing Wordsworth's Daffodil poem, searching for things that Wordsworth probably never really actually intended us to decide was there as a hidden meaning in the first place to merit a complete national ignorance of how our country is run and how our elected powers work.

      I wonder if part the reason there's no will to change this is because both Labour and the Conservatives know that whilst no one has a clue about politics then one or the other is guaranteed to get in via the current football team voting mentality and as such there will be no threat to power being taken away from either of them- when one has had a few years, the other is bound to get in, rinse and repeat.

      I think this is the fundamental difference between British and American politics at least, whilst you do get Republicans who always vote Republican and Democrats that always vote Democrat at least you had the likes of Colin Powell endorsing the Democrats because he realised despite them being the opposition, they had the better policies at the end of the day.

    2. Re:Hmmmm.... by mdwh2 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I agree that FPTP is a bad system, but:

      Don't even get me started on European government, which is a fantastic excuse for political parties to push through legislation their electorate don't want because "Europe told me to, mummy!", while conveniently overlooking the way that Europe only considered the issue because the unelected representatives of the country asked them to.

      Do you have examples? I'd argue that the UK Government has no trouble pushing through legislation (it has a majority, and it can even force legislation through the Lords with the Parliament Act), without resorting to an excuse. And on the contrary, it's European laws which are the only thing preventing some of the authoritarian laws that the Government has been forcing through (e.g., the recent ruling based on European law that taking DNA and fingerprints of anyone arrested, even if not charged, or found not guilty, is unlawful). It's the European Convention on Human Rights that gives us our only chance of "individual rights and freedoms" that you mention later on.

      The Lib Dems seem to think an arbitrarily high level of tax on people who earn more than average is "fair"

      Do you have a reference for this policy? Whilst traditionally they said they would increase income tax, now they say they will reduce it ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7615630.stm ) (incidentally, this change came with the "guy with all the depth of a two-dimensional object"). Given that Labour now plan an even higher rate of tax for high earners ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7745070.stm ), I'm not sure off-hand that Lib Dem policies are worse here?

      So who does that leave for me, and a heavy majority of friends I've talked to on political subjects, who believe in things like individual rights and freedoms, in exchange for individual responsibility; strong laws, but due process to enforce them; small, weak government; low taxes; healthy European relationships for trade, but not all the other stuff that doesn't work at the current time because the nations are too unequal to start with; basically liberal economics, but with controls imposed to prevent companies that have grown large from becoming too powerful either in a certain market or compared to their employees; a basic social safety net, but otherwise letting people earn their own rewards; and other similar policies?

      Remember that no one can be expected to match your views 100% - unless you stand yourself. But Lib Dems fit a lot of those I would say, especially with their changed position on tax.

    3. Re:Hmmmm.... by He+who+knows · · Score: 3, Interesting

      We do now get political education called "Citizen ship". we have to spend an hour a day on it and it is useless. It is basically propaganda for labor saying how good they are with new laws. Nobody pays any attention to it. The people who can understand what it is about realise how awful it is while the people it is aimed at don't care about it. I feel sorry for people who now have to do it for GCSE. It is worse than media studies or music tech.

  2. See to believe.... by qw0ntum · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A link to the company's study: http://www.fortify.com/servlet/download/user/OpenSource_Security_WP_V5.pdf

    While they raise a couple interesting points, my first impression is that they broadly generalize from a small sample set. Specifically, they only look at about 10 Java projects (including Tomcat, Hibernate, and JBoss), and proceed to conclude that the open source community is unresponsive to security threats. Conspicuously absent are any Linux distributions (let alone any *BSD... they have obviously never heard of OpenBSD), OpenOffice, or any tools likely to make it into desktop use for the UK government.

    Oh, and the solution to all this apparently is to rely on their company's security auditing services to make sure that your company doesn't have "hidden security holes".... Riiiight....

    --
    'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
    1. Re:See to believe.... by eof · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yes. Not only was the study out of context with the conclusions TFA reached (It's a study specific to FOSS Java-based projects and deployments, not FOSS in general), but the study itself isn't clear on what its objectives were. It fails to elaborate on methodologies used to conduct the examinations of projects or process, fails to elaborate on any of the security issues found, and fails to offer any comparative analysis with a successful application of the study to other projects, open source or otherwise. It reeks of FUD.

  3. Re:Anyone for TenDRA? by williamhb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Some branches of the UK Government still do develop software and publish it with very permissive licenses. For example, JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) has sponsored a number of projects to produce open source software in higher education. And various other arms of the British Government always have spent huge amounts of money through private firms, often falling flat on their faces. Government projects failing isn't a new invention.

  4. Conflict of interest? by eof · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Fortify Software is not exactly a neutral party for conducting studies of the fitness of FOSS for enterprise software use. Half its Board of Directors have ties to enterprise software and service corporations like PeopleSoft, Sybase, Oracle, and Microsoft. I think I might get a second opinion.

  5. Enterprise-level change control by Lord+Bitman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've yet to be in an enterprise which uses enterprise-level change control.

    Working for one of the world's largest commercial companies: Closest thing to "source control" was a rigorous automated backup process across network shares.

    Working for a small commercial company which sold commercial data processing tools for some of the world's largest commercial companies, and the U.S. Military, and various parts of the U.S. Government: Closest thing to "source control" was laws requiring our code be held in escrow for every release. We routinely released completely untested versions and claimed that it was a re-build of the same sources. Eventually management was convinced to start using source control after asking if anyone had an old copy of a file lying around and I quickly produced it from my local repository. Just before I left, I brought up the issue of segmentation faults and memory corruption, and was told "we can't avoid signalling if we're given bad inputs".

    Working for possibly the largest I.T. Company in the world, processing data for the U.S. Government: One person in charge of source control. No branching allowed. Occasionally heard complaints from the guru that people were overwriting each-other's changes. Never heard the word "security" mentioned at any point. Found out I could get a root shell and modify anyone else's source code by passing bad parameters to the reporting system.

    --
    -- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
  6. Re:"Sells software"? Microsoft Partner! by myxiplx · · Score: 4, Interesting

    err... less of the FUD please.

    First of all, why on earth are you assuming a multi million dollar project is going to be using software supported by some guy called bob?

    Rewrite that as using open source software supported by Canonical, Novell, Red Hat or Sun, and all of a sudden Open Source is competing on much more equal footing, and your first argument goes out of the window. After all, you could just have easily bought some closed source software off 'Bob' for your multi-million pound project.

    What that, you don't trust Bob's software, and would rather buy from a big company? Funny that.

    And do you *really* think Microsoft's EULA disclaimers don't apply to large organizations? Bill Gates didn't get Microsoft to where they are today by the company being dumb. I've seen their volume license terms, and if anything they're *more* restrictive, not less. By all means, quote me a paragraph or two from one of these 'favourible' EULA's that show me I'm wrong, but somehow I don't think that's going to happen.

  7. Re:Just another way to fight... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I would beg to differ. I do this because I am one of the people advising, well indeed pushing OS within the Conservative Party, hence the AC moniker.

    While it may used as a political football there is a good reason also for getting FOSS into Govt. It saves money, which is always good, and if we get Govt to use it, we can get schools to use it and hopefully start to reverse the abysmal decline in coding and computer science in our schools. That's my agenda for pushing it anyway - it's something that the country needs in the short term to save money and that will have real and tangible benefits in the long term in developing and furthering a knowledge based economy