Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

6 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. 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. 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.

  4. 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.