UK Gov't Reneges On Open Source Promise For Cloudstore 2.0

DerekduPreez writes "The UK government has finally unveiled the second iteration of its Cloudstore after a number of delays, and has reneged on its pledge to make version 2.0 open source. Cloudstore is an online catalogue that the public sector can use to procure cloud services provided by suppliers signed up to the G-Cloud framework. The first version of the Cloudstore was unveiled in February. Computerworld UK spoke to former G-Cloud director Chris Chant shortly after the first release, who was at the time also overseeing the second iteration. He stated during his interview that Cloudstore 2.0 would be go live in April and it would be built using open source code. However, following weeks of delays, the Cabinet Office has now confirmed that the second iteration also isn't open source."

Comments

Such a thing...!

[Anonymous Coward]

Around a year ago, I was mindlessly surfing the internet (as I often do) when I came across an enigmatic web page. The page, which looked like a warning from my web browser, informed me that I had a virus installed on my computer and that to fix it, I should install a strange anti-virus program that I'd never heard of (which I found peculiar considering the fact that I already had anti-virus software installed on my computer). Despite having reservations about installing it, I did so anyway (since it appeared to be a legitimate warning).

I cannot even fathom what I was thinking at that time. Soon after attempting to install the so-called anti-virus software, my desktop background image changed into a large red warning sign, warnings about malware began making appearances all over the screen, and a strange program I'd never seen before began nagging me to buy a program to remove the viruses. What should have been obvious previously then became clear to me: that software was a virus. Frustrated by my own stupidity, I began tossing objects around the room and cursing at no one in particular.

After I calmed down, I reluctantly took my computer to a local PC repair shop and steeled myself for the incoming fee. When I entered, I noticed that there were four men working there, and all of them seemed incredibly nice (the shop itself was clean and stylish, too). After I described the situation to them, they gave me a big smile (as if they'd seen and heard it all before), accepted the job, and told me that the computer would be working like new again in a few days. At the time, I was confident that their words held a great degree of truth to them.

The very next day, while I was using a local library's computer and browsing the internet, I came across a website dedicated to a certain piece of software. It claimed that it could fix up my PC and make it run like new again. I knew, right then, merely from viewing a single page on the website, that it was telling the truth. I cursed myself for not discovering this excellent piece of software before I had taken my PC to the PC repair shop. "It would've saved me money. Oh, well. I'm sure they'll get the job done just fine. I can always use this software in the future to conserve money." Those were my honest thoughts at the time.

Two days later, my phone rang after I returned home from work. I immediately was able to identify the number: it was the PC repair shop's phone number. Once I answered, something strange occurred; the one on the other end of the line spoke, in a small, tormented voice, "Return. Return. Return. Return. Return." No matter what I said to him, he would not stop repeating that one word. Unsettled by this odd occurrence, I traveled to the PC repair shop to find out exactly what happened.

Upon arriving inside the building, I looked upon the shop, which was a shadow of its former self, in shock. There were countless wires all over the floor, smashed computer parts scattered in every direction I looked, fallen shelves on the ground, desks flipped over on the ground, and, to make matters even worse, there was blood splattered all over the wall. Being the reasonable, upstanding, college-educated citizen that I was, I immediately concluded that the current state of the shop was due to none other than an employee's stress from work. I looked around a bit more, spotted three bodies sitting against the wall, and in the middle of the room, I spotted my computer. "Ah. There it is." Directly next to it was the shop's owner, sitting on the ground in the fetal position.

When I questioned him, he kept repeating a single thing again and again: "Cannot be stopped! Cannot be stopped! Cannot be stopped!" I could not get him to tell me what was wrong, but after a bit of pondering, I quickly figured out precisely what happened: they were unable to fix my computer like they had promised. Disgusted by their failure, I turned to the shop's owner (who I now noticed had a gun to his head), and spat in his general direction. I then turned my back to him as

expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Anonymous Coward]

The post-1970s Tories are nothing more and nothing less than a representative for the interests of a few very rich businessmen. Despite their waffle about the free market and the evils of statism, they're very much Italian corporatists, and everything they do ends up increasing the flow of Treasury cash to their friends. Whenever a Tory policy is announced, there is only one question you need to ask to understand it: which big business makes money from this?

People who voted for them on a deficit reduction strategy are stupid: the recession was not caused by any individual government, although it was certainly caused by Western Thatcherite policy which Blair adopted and which Cameron continues to adopt. Their "savings" are merely ways of leaving the poor destitute and desperate to provide cheap labour, while they continue to find new ways of wasting money on expensive contracts - see article.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Theophany]

Yes. Because we would be so much better off with the fiscal moron twins Ed Milliband and Ed Balls running the country.

These are bad times politically and economically. The country's finances are in a mess and we have a deficit of sound political leadership both in practice and potential; arguing that the Torys are evil is like arguing that the lesser of two evils is too evil. The reality is that regardless of who is in No. 10 we're all screwed in one way or another.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Anonymous Coward]

To be absolutely fair, the pre-70's Tories weren't much better!

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and just when you think you might get a chance to stop flip flopping between two parties the bulk of the UKians vote against a change from first past the post and thus maintain the status quo.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Myu]

*Adds "omnishambles" tag*

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Bert64]

Unfortunately, the only viable alternative is Labour, who are just as bad as the Tories... They are all just out to line their own pockets, and thanks to big business control of the media there will never be sufficient widespread publicity for any alternatives.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Bert64]

How many of those voting do you think actually bothered to check the facts of what they were voting for, rather than just listening to what the media told them? Big media is run by the same people, they want to keep the status quo because it benefits them.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Myu]

The Tory party aren't the lesser of two evils; they're in the top three or four of about 20 evils (EDL and BNP being obvious winners in that list). Why not vote Green, UKIP or Independent? Or, alternatively, the SNP/Plaid Cymru?

The only wasted votes are those that go to parties that don't need them.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Nursie]

At least it's not labour in power.

Whenever a Labour policy was announced the only question that came to mind was "How much is this going to cost me?" and it was usually quite a lot.

And while your bleating is cute, they had over a decade of the best economic conditions I've seen in my lifetime, and still managed to screw up the economy. And that's all before you take into account their abhorrent social policies - ASBOs, CCTV, ID cards, just to name a few.

I'm fine with you not voting for the Tory party (I never have), but voting labour is just as bad, if not worse, than you try to make out voting conservative to be.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[horza]

The Tories are not the government, their are in a coalition with the Lib Dems. The massive debt was run up by an incompetent Labour government who ran up a massive deficit and sold off all our gold reserve for pennies. The coalition inherited a complete mess just as the financial world was sliding into a global recession. All of which doesn't have much to do with open sourcing or not some app they developed. From the article:
"We had said that we wanted to move to an open source solution but it has not been possible to do so in this version of CloudStore,” said a Cabinet Office spokesperson.

“We are still committed to considering a full open source solution as part of this ongoing development and are hopeful we can include API, product rating and reviews in future iterations too.”

They are not the first to want to clean up the code before releasing it OS, eg Google did the same with Honeycomb. The British have always been staggeringly incompetent when it comes to software projects. Mind-blowingly bad. Billions wasted. It's always been this way no matter who has been in government.

Phillip.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Shimbo]

Mind-blowingly bad. Billions wasted. It's always been this way no matter who has been in government.

And if the best story they Computerworld can come up with is, 'software ships in May, when they promised April', then things are going a lot better than usual.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Theophany]

Such overt political bias as a substitute for empirical evidence belies your neutrality (and thus the validity of your reply).

In simple terms, the Green Party, UKIP, Plaid Cmyru and by extension many Independent candidates are single-issue puppets. They are the worst of all that you could elect to form a government as they just wouldn't know what to do beyond their campaign issue of environmentalism/devolution/secession/UK exiting the EU/whatever. I had an independent candidate in my constituency for nine years (Dr. Richard Taylor) who campaigned on a single misguided issue of reopening a hospital closed down by Labour. He was just another useless panderer. 350 of those forming a government? I'll pass.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Nursie]

"The British have always been staggeringly incompetent when it comes to software projects."

Would you mind altering that to the British Government? Or the large multinational corps that run the projects for them?

There's a lot of good software comes out of the UK, and a lot of very competent engineering departments. The fact that the government uses incompetents and gives them an unlimited budgets should not be used to draw conclusions about the entire country.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[nimid]

“We are still committed to considering..."


I guess you didn't notice the subtle wording.

What they're saying is they'll definitely think about considering it - they're hoping everyone will assume they mean they're committed to open sourcing it but in fact what they're hiding is they mean exactly the opposite.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[horza]

Yes I meant the British government. CSA springs to mind wasting £539M, along with the Fire Services failure costing another £500M. Apparently the last Labour government managed to waste £26bn in botched projects and 7/10 UK government projects are failures.

The Brits in the private sector are quite excellent. However they are rarely used with government contracts outsourced abroad (usually EDS).

Phillip.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[AmiMoJo]

Clearly you have not bothered to read the Green Party or Plaid Cmyru manifestos or find out almost anything about them. In fact let's just look at the headline points from the Green Party's policy page:

Fair is worth fighting for
The banking system
Health and the NHS
Pensions
Housing
Jobs and a living wage
Transport
Young people

Notice that they don't even mention environmentalism on that list, which is what you claim is their single issue. I picked the Greens at random, but even UKIP have policies on most things.

If you are going to vote and then moan about the choice at least bother to spend one minute scanning their websites first.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Theophany]

So basically, exactly the same things everybody else is saying. Bravo, really sorting the wheat from the chaff there old boy.

I'll give you a hint, seeing as you are so hell-bent on being obtuse. The Green Party is either a party with environmentalism or legalising marijuana at its core. If they need to bloody well spell that out in their manifesto then the problems are more severe than I thought.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[BasilBrush]

Unfortunately the truth is worse than that. I did much to explain to my friends and family why AV is a better system. They still almost all voted to keep FPTP. And the reason that they were uninformed didn't apply.

The trouble is this. The vast majority of people are conservative with a small c. Even the ones that are liberal or left. They think things like "better the devil you know", and "we don't want to be out of the frying pan, into the fire". They take on board all the possible things that might be negatives about AV, and think that AV is therefore bad. What they don't do is set those negatives against the existing negatives of FPTP.

They also fear having small parties get any more power. For the same reason. They fear the unknown. They'd rather have two parties that they know are shit, rather than some small party that might be shit.

Most people are not rational enough to know what's good for them.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[BasilBrush]

I'm afraid you're just showing your ignorance of the Green Party. They're not single issue. They have a full range of policies across the board.

If rather than accuracy you just want to ignorantly stereotype, you could say that Tories and Labour are single-issue puppets. Their issues being: money and unions. That's how stupid your perception of the Green party is.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[BasilBrush]

Never say never. It used to seem like a two party system of the Tories and the Whigs. The Labour party was only formed in 1900. And by 1924 they were the ruling party.

And big media's power is waning. Newspaper circulation has been shrinking for decade. People watch less TV than they used to. People get much more of their information from the internet. And that's far more democratised. Anybody can have their own blog or site.

Now more than ever in my lifetime, there seems to be change in the air.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[BasilBrush]

they had over a decade of the best economic conditions I've seen in my lifetime, and still managed to screw up the economy.

This is common faulty thinking. When it's the party that you don't support:
1) If the economy goes well, it just happened and the party were lucky to be in power at that time.
2) If the economy goes badly, then it's that party's fault.

The extent to which it is obvious you can see right now. The fucked up economy of the end of the Labour term and through the Tory term is worldwide. You have to be a cretin of enormous proportions to say a UK party screwed the economy.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[BasilBrush]

The massive debt was run up by an incompetent Labour government who ran up a massive deficit and sold off all our gold reserve for pennies.

It's amazing how Tory supporters manage to trot that one out without remembering that their own party sold off council houses, British Gas, Rolls Royce, Ferranti, National Express, Sealink, Cable & Wireless and many more "for pennies". Tories sold off far more of the public wealth at stupidly low prices than Labour did.

The coalition inherited a complete mess just as the financial world was sliding into a global recession.

Absolutely they did. It's not their fault that we are in recession. They aren't able to control the economy. So why are they trying to? Austerity can't create growth. It just makes stagnation more unpleasant.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Sosarian Avatar]

Not quite. The Green parties started out back in the 1970s with an initial focus of environmentalism, but rapidly expanded to include other issues. As Wikipedia explains,

"Green politics is a political ideology that aims for the creation of an ecologically sustainable society rooted in environmentalism, social liberalism, and grassroots democracy. ...In addition to democracy and ecological issues, green politics is concerned with civil liberties, social justice, nonviolence and tends to support social progressivism. ...as the 'Green' ideology expanded, there also came into separate existence green movements on the political right in the form of green conservatism and eco-capitalism."

The US branch in California does a much better job than the UK Green site does of showing the key values that the parties share by phrasing the goals like questions. A few from the site:

How can we
... encourage people to commit themselves to lifestyles that promote their own health?
... ensure that representatives will be fully accountable to the people who elected them?
... have a decentralized, democratic society with our political, economic and social institutions locating power on the smallest scale (closest to home) that is efficient and practical?
... restrict the size and concentrated power of corporations without discouraging superior efficiency or technological innovation?
... induce our government and other institutions to practice fiscal responsibility?
... reclaim our country's finest shared ideals: the dignity of the individual, democratic participation, and liberty and justice for all?
... induce people and institutions to think in terms of the long range future, and not just in terms of their short range selfish interest?

I don't know which issues the UK Greens are prioritizing, but aside from regional issues, the different groups do tend to be very alike, and I know that the ideals here were pretty similar to the above when I first voted in 1995, so they've been beyond environmentalism for a long time.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Nursie]

Sorry, no, you can't credit Labour with the good years and then pass off that bad years as a worldwide phenomenon, when both were happening worldwide! My faulty thinking?

They rode the worldwide financial waves, and while doing it they expanded the public sector massively and ran up huge amounts of debt, all seemingly in anticipation that Gordon Christ had ended boom and bust forever. They were shown up to be incompetents that left the country in a financially dangerous state. So in answer to your facile points -

1) The world economy went well, so Labour spent like there was no tomorrow
2) Tomorrow came, it's their fault the UK has piles of debt and too many people sucking the government teat.

You'd have to be a cretin of enormous proportions to not see that the specifics of the British economy as it now stands are entirely the fault of the retards on the red side of the house.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[BasilBrush]

Sorry, no, you can't credit Labour with the good years and then pass off that bad years as a worldwide phenomenon, when both were happening worldwide! My faulty thinking?

Yes, your faulty thinking for a second time. I didn't do that. Only you made that mistake. (in reverse.)

You'd have to be a cretin of enormous proportions to not see that the specifics of the British economy as it now stands are entirely the fault of the retards on the red side of the house.

And there you are, you're still doing it. Cretin.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Anonymous Coward]

It's companies like Capita, Serco, and Thales (which is French btw) which tend to royally fuck these sorts of projects up.

The problem isn't so much the government's plans for projects (as much as I disagree with some of them), those plans are often quite feasible, the problem is the incompetent private sector firms they employ to do them, coupled with the fact that they never penalise said firms because they're generally in bed with them due to poor contract negotiations.

The reality is they should claim back every penny from companies like Serco when such projects fail outright, but they don't, they often do the opposite and buy their way out paying penalty charges for quitting the project.

The reality is that shit companies like Serco, Capita, Thales need to stop screwing the tax payer, whilst the government needs to grow some balls in contract negotiation to remove any risk from the tax payer. If they did the latter, then the former would vanish as an issue overnight.

Still, the only flip side of it is that most of these database projects they produce are horrible and often infringe civil liberties in some way, so perhaps it's actually best they do keep on failing. If only we could just stop tax payers money flowing into private hands on the order of billions in the first place.

For what it's worth my employer has completed many British government contracts over the years, on time, and on budget, so rest assured, the common factor in these problems isn't simply the government by itself - with us their requirements have been fine and perfectly achievable. It's the few bad companies whose existence is based entirely on fucking the tax payer and little else. I speak from experience that the only way to get contracts from the British governments is to have inside people who know who to talk to to get said contracts - you need staff with connections in government, and this is why the likes of Serco etc. are so succesful despite their abysmal record of failure - because they have people left and right in Whitehall who get them these contracts that ensure no risk to them, and no pressure to even produce a succesful product. Making money from public sector contracts in the UK is pretty much entirely about who you know, not what you know, or what you can actually do in practice.

A/C for obvious reasons.

Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party

[Dr_Barnowl]

Austerity is a tool to move power and money into corporate hands. This is why the IMF always insists on it when they offer emergency loans.

They embark on a systematic program of fucking up public services until they collapse, then corporations can pick up the slack and start turning the screw.

run for the hills

[Anonymous Coward]

they must have seen the zealots coming lol

Truth?

[Kangburra]

Honestly it is like politicians never tell the truth any more, oh wait! :)

Re:Truth?

[martin-boundary]

Yeah, what changed is that we stopped spanking them for lying :-(

renege

[hammeraxe]

renege /ri'neg/
Verb:
Go back on a promise, undertaking, or contract.

Re:renege

[Hognoxious]

Informative

Adj:
Universally known, but copy-pasted from a dictionary for no apparent reason.

Re:renege

[Anonymous Coward]

Informative

Adj: Universally known, but copy-pasted from a dictionary for no apparent reason.

Don't be naive; they're doing it for the karma.

Re:renege

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, try "Universally known, except by idiots with more modpoints than IQ who are apparently incapable of using Google".

Re:renege

[hammeraxe]

I do understand that this is Slashdot and everyone here is American, but still...

Given that my English is of a high standard and that I had to look up this word means that many people reading this article will have to do the same. So why not be nice and save them the effort.

Re:renege

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because it's a French word adopted and bastardized by the English language.

WTF is open source in this context?

[Anonymous Coward]

Two months to dramatically change a product from a 'close-source' to 'open-source' model, whatever that means, in the context of an application that no one will use outside of government work, means someone had incredibly unrealistic expectations and is not in touch with real development times.

What does it mean in this context though, open-source? That they were using linux for the backend? Or that they are releasing the code to this project? Either way it seems silly to care about this, there are better (both "free" and non-free) options for your own "cloudstore" than a government built package, assuming youre looking for a document and knowledge repository.

And the problem is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Computer geeks work for a living. Therefore, the government knows that they can't but their vote. Might as well sell the thing and use the money to buy votes elsewhere.

Re:And the problem is...

[Sosarian Avatar]

If you think that merely having a job (which isn't the case for all computer geeks) makes a person immune to having their vote bought or to rhetoric, you need to get out a lot more...

Nothings changed

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical my Government, making promises, then finding out they cant make much money from open source, so we will have a proprietary system instead, just so some corporation can make money from the data and the installation. Just wait 4 years and see who becomes a board member of the supply and administration companies.

Nothings changed just the same, the people at the top feathering their nests.

the real story

[Gravis Zero]

what they said:

"We had said that we wanted to move to an open source solution but it has not been possible to do so in this version of CloudStore,” said a Cabinet Office spokesperson.

the truth:

"We said it would be open source but it was inconvenient for us and we have no legal obligation to actually follow through on any promises we made to the public," said a rat.

WTH is CloudStore ?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what the hell is the G-Cloud ?

I'm sorely tired of all these 'marketing' terms... I work at the pointy end of IT - y'know rack servers, networking, routers and all that... To me the 'Cloud' is just a box or boxes in a rack running Xen.

Cloudstore sounds like yet another one of those soundbite services dreamed up by some slick suited tan and teeth marketing type.

I had someone arguing with me the other day - they wanted to use "The Cloud" for something so I said sure I'll sort out some space on a server in a rack and they were like "No we don't want a server in a rack" we want "The Cloud"...

So I sorted out some space on a server in a rack, gave em the login details and told em "There's your cloud"....

Re:WTH is CloudStore ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Xen = yesterday's cloud

Re:WTH is CloudStore ?

[manu0601]

And what the hell is the G-Cloud ?

Since "cloud" is a marketing term that contains no meaning, you can make press releases easier to understand if you substitute it with 'stuff".

UK home office talks agout G--stuff frameworks and StuffStore. It immediatly looks that something not worth a news

Headline

[JoeInnes]

Government disappoint electorate. More at ten.

Saw this comming

[magpie]

The head of IT acquisition and the tech head of the civil service quit no long back. Thhe tories have got there mates in. (would provide links but...well hibs lost so am in no state to do so...see el-reg)

Breaking news...

[Anonymous Coward]

UK Gov == lying bastards.
water is wet, sky is blue, bears shit in the woods...