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."

32 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 sqldr · · Score: 5, Funny

      Clearly timothy is unfamiliar with UK politics.

      Could be worse.. half of america thinks Obama is the antichrist.

      --
      I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
    3. Re:Hmmmm.... by Anonymous+Brave+Guy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The problem we have in the UK isn't just football team mentality, it's the bizarre way our "representatives" are elected. Well, the way some of them are elected, anyway. It is disturbing that the so-called "upper house" was, until recently, a group of people who hold office only because a distant ancestor was rich or because they hold a high office in a particular religion (yes, really). These days, they are almost all appointed, though I think the 92 hereditary peers who survived Labour's initial reforms are still there, and the Lords conveniently overturned a strong vote in the Commons for a 100% appointed upper house, arguing for 100% appointed (and therefore their own jobs) instead. In any case, members of the upper house still retain office regardless of trivia like criminal convictions and accepting bribes to "do the right thing" with certain laws. Perhaps we should just go back to the fifteenth century and let the church run the show? At least 5% of the population are practising Christians, which gives them more moral authority than our upper house today!

      Meanwhile, the first-past-the-post voting system ensures that the Commons alternates between the two dominant parties with a huge majority each, even though that is in no way representative of the strength of support the party in power actually carries among the population at the time. 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.

      In any case, none of this helps me: I have fairly moderate, well-considered, and (I think) consistent political views, yet none of the parties with even a chance of getting a seat in Parliament represents my views. Labour are a complete waste of space, even if you're one of the "hard-working families" they were formed to look out for, and the current administration has no democratic mandate anyway. The Tories don't know what their policies are, though they keep trying to sound really convinced about what they believe this week, and they're certainly still on the draconian side when it comes to state power and even worse when it comes to allowing businesses to become the most powerful players in the game. (They're in favour of copyright term extension too, BTW, despite an overwhelming majority — for once the over-used term is justified — of respondents to the government's Gowers Review criticising such a move.) Cameron all but washed his hands of one of the few guys he had with the guts to stand up for what he believed in. The Lib Dems seem to think an arbitrarily high level of tax on people who earn more than average is "fair", probably because very few such people will ever vote for them anyway, and their policies on things like the environment and transport are the kind of thing you can only say if you're never going to achieve office because they conveniently overlook trivia like keeping the lights on and getting people to work. The one guy they had with any sort of clue was leader only briefly, and then stepped aside for another guy with all the depth of a two-dimensional object. Then, in England at least, you're into minor parties like the Greens (whose one issue got stolen by everyone else), the BNP (who do a disturbingly good job of sounding reasonable on some topics, until you realise what they really mean), the UKIP (who also might sound plausible on those sorts of issues, but have no credibility after pulling stunts like letting Kilroy-Silk's ego run the show for a while), and so on.

      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 tr

      --
      If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
    4. Re:Hmmmm.... by Xest · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, but it also makes it easier for those who use the software to locate and fix the flaws first ;)

      To give a better explanation of why OSS is more secure though, think about this scenario. You have a web server on the wide open internet serving an important web page for your business or institution and any downtime will lose you thousands, maybe millions of pounds of profit (think how much Amazon would lose if it's site goes down for example). If you run an open source web server and an exploit is uncovered by security researchers that allows an attacker to take over your web server then you can edit the source code to fix it immediately, or at least put a quick fix in place to block the attack and have very little, perhaps even no downtime.

      If however you rely on a propriatary vendor, say Microsoft, to fix it and it takes them 2 weeks to release a patch, what do you do in the meantime? Do you keep your web server up and risk having your web server hijacked or do you take it down and lose millions in business?

      This is just an example, you can mitigate the problem by having a firewall block attacks but this only works to a degree. I wasn't too sure about why OSS myself was more secure for a while, but it's one of those things that when you look into the reasoning behind such comments you'll see realise that yes, they're right, OSS really is fundamentally a more secure concept.

      Of course, the other thing to realise is that binaries are themselves fairly trivial to interpret for people who have a strong computer science background such that it's not even particularly a massively difficult task to spot exploits in closed source software. It is however often much harder to fix faults in closed source software in the same way.

  2. The British like Americans seem to be incompetent by bogaboga · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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...

    I think we need to be objective here. Software both closed source and open source is created by human beings.

    By nature, these human beings make mistakes.

    The question then becomes: Which model of software development fixes security issues faster? We should collect statistics here and convince these Britons that OSS is still the best model around.

    We should also remind the skeptics about OSS, that more than 80% of internet traffic is handled by OSS systems, so if OSS were that insecure, it would show...fast.

  3. What a credible argument against OSS by Walkingshark · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Our own research, however, has concluded that open source software exposes users to significant and unnecessary business risk, as the security is often overlooked, making users more vulnerable to security breaches," said Fortify vice president, Richard Kirk.

    US outfit Fortify Software has come up with research to prove it.

    Uh, wow, a US company that sells software doesn't want the British government to switch to open source software? What a radical position to take! Of course, it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that its hard to price gouge a rich government for security software if they're not running propriatary crap. I'm sure if they had their way the Brits would all be running Vista and MS Office.

    --
    The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
  4. Re:Doesn't make sense by Walkingshark · · Score: 4, Informative

    Not to mention its an American company with a product to sell, and that product's utility is strongly diminished by using open source software.

    --
    The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
  5. An indication? by JPortal · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    Not really. Politicians will grasp at anything to make sensational claims about their opponents. Doesn't matter if it involves IT, their sex lives or what they eat for breakfast.

    American here, maybe politics are better in the UK. (but I doubt it)

    1. Re:An indication? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Funny

      Doesn't matter if it involves IT, their sex lives or what they eat for breakfast.

      Unfortunately with some MPs it may involve all three.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    2. Re:An indication? by SpringRevolt · · Score: 4, Funny

      An orange, a CAT5 cable and a pair of stockings..?

  6. Re:The British like Americans seem to be incompete by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    We should collect statistics here and convince these Britons that OSS is still the best model around.

    Yeah, maybe we look here https://opensource.fortify.com/ They scanned 103 projects with a total of 24668646 loc and found a total of 403 error which makes for 1 error in 61212 loc or 4 errors per projects. Not too bad I'd say. Oh, btw of those 403 errors found 383 are already fixed.

  7. Missing step ???? by Galactic+Dominator · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1. Identify greatest long term threat to my industry

    2. Conduct "Research" on threat and publish to increase FUD.

    3. Sell products to "fix" FUD issues.

    4. Profit!

    Subject: No ?????????
    Filter error: Your subject looks too much like ascii art.

    You saw him repressing me, didn't you?

    --
    brandelf -t FreeBSD /brain
  8. Just another way to fight... by D-Cypell · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Politics is about, "We would do things better than you do!", open source software is just an unfortunate, innocent bystander in this process. If Labour were open source advocates, the Tories would be saying exactly what the, presumably Labour funded, security company are saying right now.

    Personally, I think the time has come for another interesting political scandal so they will leave the software industry alone.

    For those of you not familiar with UK politics, it works a bit like this...

    There are 2 main parties, plus a 3rd with a small but meaningful number of seats. Each of the two main parties elect a leader who becomes candidate for PM. Labour are historically the party for the working man, formed out of the unions, however, in recent years they have figured out that the working man is significantly less likely to invite you for a spin on their yacht, so have shifted their position a little.

    The current opposition party, the conservatives (or 'Torys'), usually have MPs that come from the rich and privately educated set, such as the hilarious London mayor Boris Johnson (seriously, look this guy up, he is a laugh a minute). They stand for strong family values, but are actually quite likely to be found having a three-way homosexual romp in a public toilet while their wife is at home taking care of the kids.

    Neither party gives the slightest toss about open source software (at least, not even close to the level that we do here), but they *do* care about scoring some points. If FOSS is the battlegroud-dujour so be it... tomorrow it will be the colour of the sky!

    Incidentally, you have have detected a slight hint of British cynicism in my post, it is pretty common. When Obama got elected I was thinking, "Does this guy have a brother that can come and help us out?", then I found out he has a brother that has recently been charged with drug offenses in Kenya... but to be honest, I am still thinking... 'He'll do!'.

    1. Re:Just another way to fight... by williamhb · · Score: 4, Informative

      Ok, a slightly less blinded-by-the-cynicism round-up.

      Labour used to be dominated by the unions, but then realised this was making them almost unelectable as anybody who isn't in a union really doesn't like other people's unions very much. They've tried to become centrist.

      Conservatives used to be very much for "small government", turning everything free market and cutting taxes as far as possible. They've been realising that times have changed since the 80s and a social conscience is generally seen as a good thing. So, both the main parties have been chasing "the middle ground", or at least marketing themselves that way.

      The Liberal Democrats formed from an amalgam of a breakaway party from Labour (the SDP) and one of the old British political parties (the Liberals). They tend to have a socially progressive set of policies, often highlighting just one or two policies that sound populist or radical (eg, local income taxes) because they struggle to keep their profile up in the media.

      Things are complicated further because while the Lib Dems have far too few seats ever to form a government, they have much more evenly spread support than the two main parties -- so northern seats are often Labour vs Lib Dem battles, while southern seats are often Conservative vs Lib Dem battles, making British politics a very odd fight: it's not a straight fight between Labour and Conservatives, but also a question of which of them can fight the Lib Dems at a local level more convincingly.

      Also, although the Conservatives have a lead in the polls, the original headline is wrong to say that the Conservatives are "certainly going to be the next government", because of the way constituency borders are at the moment. The large lead in the vote could very easily turn into a small loss in numbers of seats, or a "hung parliament" (which in practice would probably mean a Labour minority government, as on economic issues the Lib Dems vote with Labour more often than with the Conservatives)

  9. Anyone for TenDRA? by Antony+T+Curtis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The British Government, or at least, branches of it, used to be very open source friendly. Developing software and publishing it with a very permissive license attached to the source code.

    Alas, since the Blair Regime started, that all seemed to come to an end... and the British people had to learn to put up with huge IT spending to private firms, usually affiliated with Fujitsu or Microsoft ... and those public IT projects would famously fall flat on their faces and be quietly shelved.

    Just look at the recent hiccups with the UK Biometrics scheme... 'nuff said.

    --
    No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
  10. "Sells software"? Microsoft Partner! by rtfa-troll · · Score: 4, Informative

    A simple Google Search shows rather more than just being a vendor of some random proprietary software. Fortify is a Microsoft partner which has indulged in joint product launches with them and this isn't even mentioned in the original article.

    This is yet another example of a Microsoft inspired campaign of lies. This group never changes and they and their software should be automatically excluded from all state contracts for ethical violations.

    --
    =~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
  11. 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.

  12. Re:The British like Americans seem to be incompete by williamhb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think we need to be objective here. ... We should collect statistics here and convince these Britons that OSS is still the best model around.

    Because there's nothing more objective than deciding what conclusion you want to convince people of before collecting the statistics! (You don't happen to work for Gartner, do you?)

  13. " will certainly be the next British government " by jools33 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In case I missed something there are multiple parties in the UK who will contest the next election - there are no certainties. Whilst the Tories may have a strong lead now in the polls anything could happen between now and the election.

  14. 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.

  15. Re:"Sells software"? Microsoft Partner! by tokabola · · Score: 5, Informative

    The "press release" by Fortify for this claims that Larry Suto performed the test. He has a reputation for faulty, perhaps even fraudulent, testing methods. He also only tested 11 specific Java apps (and Fortify sells "audited" versions of those apps). The tests were performed using Fortify's software, no other testing software was used. So the accuracy of this test relies on the accuracy of Fortify's software, which hasn't been independently tested as far as I can tell. The press release also mentions findings by the Forrester Group, who are well known for a history of spreading inaccurate FUD about non-MS software.

    --
    Open Source for Open Minds
  16. Re:"Sells software"? Microsoft Partner! by romanval · · Score: 4, Informative

    OSS lacks QA - show me a OSS project that government is likely to use that has any quality assurances. the big font stating "use at own risk" is a massive turn off for government and rightly so.

    Um.. Microsoft's EULA basically says the same thing.

  17. Open source bad? by buggy_throwback · · Score: 5, Funny

    Then why use it for your website? http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.fortify.com

  18. Re:"Sells software"? Microsoft Partner! by IBBoard · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well the US DoD seems to be trusting to OSS with forge.mil. I know the company I work for does a variety of UK government contracts as well and we're using more and more open source (mainly Eclipse and its plugins, Protege and OWL in my area of work).

    Besides, what's the real difference between relying on an OSS project with no license fee for five years then (possibly) having to migrate and learn something new but similar versus being charged year on year for Office 2003 then having to migrate to 2007 and all its new UI and still being charged year on year?

  19. Re:The British like Americans seem to be incompete by supervillainsf · · Score: 5, Informative

    We can also look here http://www.fortify.com/partners/technologyPartners.jsp and note that Microsoft is one of their partners.

  20. Re:"Sells software"? Microsoft Partner! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'd trust my own employees with access to the sourcecode, or lacking employees competent in the area, consultants with the same source code access. With the consultants I'd also have the added bonus of being able to replace them, where they not able to fix my problems :)

    You know, you _do_ have to pay for support, FOSS or closed source. But you do get what you pay for. And with FOSS, that includes the ability to switch vendor without switching the software.

  21. 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.

  22. Re:"Sells software"? Microsoft Partner! by cowbutt · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't think anyone would propose that a government just take a random FOSS project from freshmeat.net and put it into production, least of all with anything resembling sensitive data.

    However, both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server have both achieved Common Criteria EAL4+ assurance, making them equivalent to Solaris, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP in the eyes of the evaluation bodies and therefore suitable for many roles within government IT systems.

  23. This is when OS shines by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 4, Insightful

    such security fixes could dry up overnight on a OSS project...start thinking like you've got 100 million dollar projects relying on this stuff.

    This situation is PRECISELY when open source shows its strength. Take the massive annual license fee that you would need to pay MS to provide such support and hire your own, competent IT staff to maintain the code you want. First this means that you are creating jobs in the UK rather than paying some foreign company which should be a very important consideration for the UK government especially in the current climate. Secondly you now have your own local experts to provide support, implement the features that you want, provide support etc. etc. This puts you in a far better position than having to ring up MS. You own guys will be familiar with your usage and can give advice based on what they know the code does rather than on black-box trial and error experience. Finally you are contributing any changes and code back to the community helping those people that pay the taxes in the first place. Since this may also encourage other firms to invest in local expertise rather than ship money abroad this can help the local economy.

  24. Re:better than usa by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Whenever I worry that I'm an overly smug asshole, I look to Slashdot comments and thank CmdrTaco for giving us such a good breeding ground for idiots.