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

[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

[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

[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.

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"....