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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

Truth?

[Kangburra]

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

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.

Re:renege

[Hognoxious]

Informative

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

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"....