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UK Government Breaks Open Source Promises
judgecorp writes "The UK government has promised to favour open source systems in its procurement (and made those promises repeatedly). However, freedom of information requests have shown it is doing nothing of the sort. It is giving contracts to the same large suppliers as before."
Sadly, this is not that surprising. We are talking about the Government of the United Kingdom, or Her Majesty's Government as it is officially known. If you were a queen (who in the 21st century still won't enter the House of Commons and only talk with the House of Lords) then who would you rather listen to: him or him? We in the open-source movement have a problem with image. The sad truth is that the very people thanks to whom that movement was started don't really care about they appearance, the arguments that would get to the Upper Class. They think that just because they are Right - which they are, no doubt about that - everyone will automatically recognize that and make decision based on what would be the best for the humanity. Sadly we live in the world of politicians, lobbies, parties, Kings and Queens. We have to recognize that and work on our appearance if we ever want to go main stream.
The linked-to article cites a BBC FOI request as the source, but doesn't link to the BBC's own article on the subject, as far as I can tell.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Well it's basic stuff and it happens in every country.
The politicians are running the places and they are running them to their own advantage. The only question on any one of their mind is this:
"Does this make ME more money?"
The flow chart is then very simple:
1. No? Forget about it.
2. Yes? Let's do it.
You can't handle the truth.
...saying one thing to the public and then proceeding to do something different? I'm shocked, SHOCKED I say!
Most of the parties are happy to go back on their own manifesto policies so this really shouldn't surprise anyone.
Reading between the lines here. If an entity known for manipulating the facts is "promising" something, seems to me it is basically telling you it won't do it. If the intent was to actually do it, it would be a "contract", "law", "regulation". Or at least a "decision", "commitment" perhaps. It would come with firm numbers - percentages, dates, amounts, numbers of contracts. If the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, Pinocchio or Gaddafi said "I promise", what would you count on happenning?
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The commitment was for open STANDARDS, not open source. Open Standards are also a good thing, but they are not the same as open source.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
... and discovering that it won't work for them, for whatever reason.
They didn't say "We'll move to 50% OSS in the next year," they said "We'll look at it favorably." If they look at it and discover that, despite the costs involved in their existing software, they can't actually afford to move their data to an open source equivalent, it's not going to happen. And if it turns out there ISN'T an open source equivalent, it's really not going to happen.
While I'm not saying OSS is always more expensive -- it usually is a lot cheaper, in my experience -- there can be times when it's cheaper to stick with what you've got. Think about it. If all your data is in a proprietary system in a non-standard format, and you don't have anyone on staff who can update it, it's going to be expensive to make the switch. That one time cost may be a lot more than you have in your budget for the yearly licensing fees of that proprietary system. After all, that's WHY that proprietary system uses its own unique data format....
I'm not sure how the UK does it, but many of the US gov selection processes I've been involved in use a weighted assessment for picking a technical solution. A bunch of desired features are given point values and are weighted on importance. So on a 100 point scale, having a question like "Is it open source?" worth 1 point is actually favoring open source (all else being equal, open source will win).
The summary appears to be deliberately misleading, saying the government "promised to favour open source" whereas the BBC article you cite merely says that open source should be considered "on a level playing field".
That's not favouring. That's the opposite of favouring; it's a goal to stop favouring non-open source projects just because they're open source.
Exactly. There is a lot of very poor quality alternatives to commercial software, and a few high quality ones. Also Open Source has a tendency towards "I am going to put features in the code that I wan't" not "I am going to put features that most of my users want", Much the same concept that ended up hurting Novel. Novel was an Engineering based company and it put in a lot of cool features, but most of them their customers didn't really want at the time, so they slowly migrated off of Novel to Windows, Because Microsoft gave them features that the customers wanted.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Neither the article linked nor the BBC article cited near the top of the thread even included the word "favour". One included the phrase "level playing field" suggesting that, rather than favoring one thing or another, all were to compete fairly. The other mentions open standards, not open source, which is not the same thing at all.
The summary is a bit of agenda-driven bile with no almost relation to the article it links to.
First up: Any government department that's got a significant investment in IT can't just go out and replace, say, Microsoft Office with LibreOffice overnight. There's a huge amount of testing to do, and when you hit upon things like Access databases and Excel spreadsheets that have become an entire department's IT system, it's very tempting to say "Stuff it. We'll stick with Office."
It's even more tempting when the F/OSS firm says "Yes, we can replace all those things - it'll cost £X hundred thousand, mind." The cost of a migration to a newer version of Office isn't seen by the higher-ups for the exact same reason that these databases and spreadsheets were able to become so widespread without anyone noticing - the people that maintain them won't make a big song and dance, they'll simply quietly beaver away tweaking their database so it works in the Latest Greatest Version. The cost of that isn't seen.
Second up: Something that a lot of people in IT don't realise unless/until they start their own business. Marketing something with any degree of success is remarkably hard - and it's as much an art as it is a science. At first, "make it free of charge" (or even "Make it remarkably cheap") sounds like an absolute corker of a strategy. How can anyone fail to sell a product when the cost is zero? Hell, you could probably throw up a website and have the world beating a path to your door inside a few days!
It doesn't work like that. If you're buying a product of any significance, the choice of product probably comes more from the salesman than from the product itself. As soon as you start saying things like "the software is free, but you'd have to pay for consulting to make it all work together" - you've got two huge problems. "The software is free" is the classic "sounds too good to be true" offer that will usually be regarded with extreme suspicion - and as soon as you say just one thing that makes your prospect suspicious of you, that's it. You've lost their trust and you won't get it back again. If you've ever watched Dragons' Den (I believe the US equivalent is called "Shark Tank"), you'll have seen exactly this happen.
The second problem is the "you'd have to pay for consulting" bit. The IT consulting industry doesn't exactly have a spotless reputation; anyone who's been in industry for any length of time can tell you all about the consultant they brought in at great expense who over-promised and under-delivered. At least with a COTS package there's the possibility of being able to evaluate it for some time before going ahead, that's greatly reduced when you're paying for one-off work.
That is a false dichotomy. Closed source software is not automatically locked from further development or customizations. To use MS as an example, SharePoint developers seem pretty common these days and I've worked with a few companies that contracted out the work of adding features to Microsoft Office. It adds costs on top of the cost of the software, but, if the software covers the majority of your needs and developers can quickly add features using some simple Visual Studio add-ons, then it could still end up being a better price overall than going with an open source software package.
That doesn't mean open source always costs more or anything, but when you factor in development and support costs, it doesn't often boil down to "Open Source is cheaper." It can turn out to be far more nuanced than that.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
The real reason is even simpler than that - the people who ultimately make the buying decisions, middle management, don't want to risk their jobs. The choice is go out on a limb and choose an OSS solution or do what everyone around you has done for the last 20 years and buy MS. If you go OSS and something goes wrong, you will be the one facing the music, if you go MS and something goes wrong, their sales/support/PR people face the music. There's little incentive to be anything other than incredibly risk averse (this was especially the case before the banking crisis, when it was simple to get sign off for high budget IT projects, I'm not sure to what extent that's changed in the last couple of years).
No; he's far too rude for that.
You'd be completely wrong. This is evident in both the public and private sectors. There's a reason they say, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
Basically, the perception is that, since these guys charge a lot, they must be good at what they do. Since they're good at what they do, there's no reason to go with a competing service.