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UK Goverment IT Chief Backs Open Source Suppliers
Blacklaw writes "The UK government's deputy Chief Information Officer has outlined plans to hand public sector IT contracts over to small businesses and suppliers of open-source and cloud-based solutions in an attempt to balance the books. Speaking at the 360IT conference in London on Wednesday, Bill McCluggage also promised greater transparency over IT procurement, with tenders and contracts published online. Outlining a commitment to 'simplify, standardize and automate', McCluggage said the government would make it easier for open-source suppliers to compete for contracts, making the public sector less reliant on individual suppliers, or locked into proprietary systems."
The UK Government has announced that it will consider open-source software on an equal footing with proprietary commercial software when awarding multi-million-pound IT contracts.
Why wouldn't you consider Open Source on equal footing with commercial software by default? It seems like a redundant statement.
They very well might have been considering Open Source as an option since that announcement - the question is whether Open Source has ever actually made the the grade and been accepted as a better solution.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Whether it's open source or closed source isn't the most important thing. Whether it's run locally or in the cloud doesn't make that much difference.
What really matters is whether the data is readily accessible in a known format. If you can get your data in some sane way that is independent of your current software, then you are in control. If you cannot, then you are not in control.
Of course, going OSS and going cloud-based each have their pros and cons as well, but IMHO they are secondary to controlling the data. For example, while OSS theoretically implies being able to access your data in a known format, I would still rather use a closed source solution with a cleaner known data format than an OSS solution where the code that manipulates the file format is difficult to understand and the format itself is more awkward.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That depends on the cloud. For government IT, it might make sense to have a few large government-run datacentres that individual departments could buy time on, rather than having each project build its own separate infrastructure. The data and software would still be in the cloud, but the cloud would be in a bottle.
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