one cannot advertise anything that cannot be _PROVEN_
You can if it is "obvious" that it isn't meant to be taken seriously.
Someone (possibly even CAMRA was it?? - must have been a very off day) once complained about the Heineken ads, on the grounds that it was not true that it "refreshed" some of "the parts other beers cannot reach" as illustrated on the advertisements.
The complaint was thrown out as being daft, because it was perfectly clear that you weren't supposed to believe the advertisements in the first place.
The resulting code is unreadable... which makes it absolutely useless as far as open source is concerned.
Um, surprising as it may sound, I have looked at some open source code, you know, and some bits of it could reasonably be described as, you know, just a tad "unreadable". So there's nothing to be lost here.
Otherwise, you sound like you're only interested in effective contract management, not in the proper development of local government IT - I'm not trying to flame you, but I still think you're missing the point.
We're not the slightest bit interested in either of those. We're interested in delivering services to residents. All the IT is totally ancilliary.
You are coming across as someone who is trying very hard to justify a course that you have already decided on (proprietary).
In fact I would very much like to go with the OS solution, if only we can convince ourselves that it is safe.
but if you are "Eric Ass Raymond", which seems likely
I'm not. I've no idea who he/she/it is.
Think carefully about it and make a decision that is best for your comunity for the long term. Remember that your choice now has long-term ripple effects.
The long term is certainly an important issue. We need to know that what we choose will continue to work and continue to be supported and continue to be developed for the lifetime of the system. This is clouded by the fact that, unusually for local government procurement, we don't know how long the "long term" is, ie we don't know how long this particular software system is likely to be needed in our operations.
This is rather different to buying a dustbin lorry (I think that might translate to "refuse truck" in American?), another sort of procurement decision that councillors have to agree, where we know both that we will still have a need for such a device in seven years' time and that the device we buy is going to last seven years (and that the platform on which it runs - the road network - isn't going to change beyond recognition in that timescale).
No, read my original post, I am not "refusing to consider", I am disappointed that it's not making a better case for itself as there is a distinct possibility that it is actually the best answer.
The reason we don't have an in-house IT department any more is, I'm told (it was before my time), because once upon a time a mainframe came to the end of its useful life and needed replacing, and government would not provide the money (a small district council can't afford that sort of thing from its own resources). The only option was outsourcing.
Incidentally, take a look at Cambridgeshire County sometime - they do some good work.
I'm afraid I really can't reply to this, and I can't even give any hints as to why not, and I'm not going to respond to any guesses.
Some of the time. Other times I connected via VPN over cable modem from my own office... indeed sometimes they never noticed whether or not I was physically in their office... one day I was having an email discussion with someone and he ended up saying "I can't explain any better by email, why don't you walk over to my desk and I'll show you" and it was only that that point that I told him I hadn't been physically present in the same office all week!
Go to the URL, find the name and email of the primary author of the software and send him an email. In your email, explain the situation and invite him for a consultation. Offer to pay airfare and expenses and, perhaps, a small consulting fee for the day. Your total expense for this will be insignificant compared to the procurement costs for commercial software.
This is a public service procurement. If we did that for one potential supplier we'd have to do it for all of them, otherwise they'd sue when they lost the business.
According to your web site and resume, it appears that you are an independent software engineer, not a representative of government procurement.
In the UK being a councillor is a voluntary activity. Some councillors do do it full time, being retired or otherwise unemployed or unemployable, but there are plenty of us who have day jobs. Having a day job as a software engineer doesn't stop me being an unpaid part time councillor, and my colleagues seem to think that as I know something about software I should be on the IT committee, so I am.
Your CV even shows that you used to work at Microsoft itself.
This is not a secret - I declare it at meetings from time to time when relevant. It's not relevant to this particular procurement exercise because Microsoft don't have a relevant product.
However rather than posting vague generalizations about not being impressed, why don't you post what the open source application is that you are testing?
Oh, you know, EU public service procurement fairness rules and all that, it would probably b*gg*r up the entire process if I were to discuss the details of the products and suppliers under consideration. Daft, isn't it, but those are the rules.
You want a salesman's visit. You want a brochure...
If you read carefully you will see that I didn't say that. But I do need something other than being pointed at a URL to a demo system with no online help.
You want a demo from an expert..Can't get those from open source product consultants can we?
Apparently not. This I find considerably more disappointing than the absence of a brochure. Although I gather the consultant is having another go at trying to set this up, so I'm hoping for improvement here.
What if a commercial product cannot do what you want? Will the manufacturer tailor it just for you?
That's not my point. My point is that with a typical decent commercial product (OK, there are plenty of crap commercial products as well, let's not be silly about this) it is vastly easier to find out whether or not it can do what I want starting with, yes, the bullet points on the brochure - a first pass over a pile of brochures makes it easy to reject those that don't have a whole section of functionality that you need, or those that are clearly aimed too far up-market or too far down-market, or those that are aimed at a different market altogether.
As far as I can see Blair does not appear to have any particular interest in local government, and it is indeed all done by Prescott and his department. And then they're really only interested in London councils, and make and bend the rules in order to play politics with London councils, as the world outside London doesn't exist.
Of course the world outside London does exist, and there are lots of councils outside London, and they are caught by rules which seem completely daft and irrelevant and bizarre until you have managed to work out which parochial little London squabble caused them to be invented.
... I am involved in procurement. We are currently looking at an open source solution for a particular application (well, not completely open source, the back end is Oracle).
So far I am not impressed.
I'm not unimpressed witht the software; the difficulty is in getting a handle on what the software can and can't do and confidence that what it can't do will be fixed.
When you're buying commercial software you get some or all of
a visit from a salesman
product brochures
a demonstration from an expert in the product
documentation
comprehensive on line help
a road map or new features release plan
clarity as to what you do and don't get in the support contract
and so on.
With this open source offering we appear to be getting few or none of the above: "here's the URL for the demo system, go and play with it". Um yes. Thanks. Not, I fear, a basis on which a public authority can spend lots of tax payers' money on a service for tax payers.
Whilst it seems entirely possible that the open source offering is well designed to meet our needs it also seems entirely possible that it will be unable to demonstrate this to an acceptable risk profile so we'll have to buy something else. The competitors, as usual, include paying for a managed service elsewhere or buying commercial software.
You usually win an election by winning on differential turnout - getting your people to turn out and the opposition to stay at home. Usually you don't win by persuading people to change their vote.
In Brent East the four hundred activists were told "go out and get 20 votes each and we've won". They succeeded. But the opposition didn't; hence result.
Depends where you live. June 10th in the UK, we don't do Sunday elections. What's more, the government has moved the UK local elections from May to 10th June in an attempt to increase turnout at the European elections, on the grounds that people will go out to vote for their local councils and might as well vote for the European parliament at the same time.
The other theory, the one I believe, is that people will think "oh, it's the European election today, how boring" and stay at home, so the net result will be a decrease in turnout for the local elections.
Exactly. It's ludicrous that the rest of the world has to go out and buy different phones that are not needed anywhere else just because the USA won't follow standards. Cheaper dual band phones cope with the whole of the rest of the world just fine.
The fact that the different more expensive phone needed in the USA happens to use the same protocols but in a different waveband, rather than a completely different protocol, is only of interest to nerds; what ordinary punters know is they've got to buy a different phone because normal phones that work in the rest of the world don't work in the USA.
I prefer slightly worse stuff to perfectly consistent stuff in many ways. It forces constant change, fights off stagnation, etcetera.
Fine. Just so long as you don't mind crashed spaceships and being unable to make phone calls. (What *do* Americans do when travelling abroad? - their phones won't work at all anywhere. Actually perhaps they don't notice this, as their phones only work a bit on a good day at home anyway.)
Remember the reaction of the average American to an international standard is to denounce it as a communist plot, particularly if one of the European standards bodies takes an interest (or even ISO, which most Americans regard as European and therefore communist).
If you want an example of how well Americans make good use of international standards you just have to look at their mobile phone system... and laugh or weep to taste. (I have this phone which works in 199 countries of the world and doesn't work in one, which is... guess which? Likewise there's just one county in the world which uses strange paper sizes... just one country which is so wedded to Imperial units that it crashes spacecraft in preference to following international standards... and so on and so on...)
Now, if most operating system manufacturers were European and Japanese this would be a good idea, because they'd be likely to follow any new international standard. But it happens to be a fact of life that many operating systems are produced or contributed to by Americans, so any such idea is dead in the water before it gets off the ground.
Some months after the original story I was at some dinner or other at which some Cambridge physicists were present, so we asked them their views.
"Well," they said, "we've set it up in the lab, and it gets hot." Then they shrugged and talked about something else. (I don't remember who this was or I'd maybe ask them what their views are now.)
Could you please specify why you think that there is a lack of freedom of speech in Germany in this case?
Well, it seems to me[1] that comments posted on this site about Microsoft (to pick an example at random) are much "worse" (in terms of being both rude and lacking in verifiable accuracy) than anything SCO has said, but the denizens of Slashdot seem to approach the two rather differently.
Denizens of Slashdot seem to support the freedom to say rude things about other people in the USA but to applaud the inability to say similar rude things about different other people in Germany. My comment was about the double standards of posters here, not really about German law.
[1] Yes that was me posting as AC earlier (from another machine, haven't a clue what my password is).
(1) build in a conservation area (2) wait several hundred years (3) the house will have to be maintained properly as it will be illegal to pull it down or let it fall down.
Slashdot Mirror
First cheap IBM PC clone should get a look-in, surely?
one cannot advertise anything that cannot be _PROVEN_
You can if it is "obvious" that it isn't meant to be taken seriously.
Someone (possibly even CAMRA was it?? - must have been a very off day) once complained about the Heineken ads, on the grounds that it was not true that it "refreshed" some of "the parts other beers cannot reach" as illustrated on the advertisements.
The complaint was thrown out as being daft, because it was perfectly clear that you weren't supposed to believe the advertisements in the first place.
Not if they can make money by deliberate waste, anyway; that's obviously a much more important contribution to the American Way.
The resulting code is unreadable ... which makes it absolutely useless as far as open source is concerned.
Um, surprising as it may sound, I have looked at some open source code, you know, and some bits of it could reasonably be described as, you know, just a tad "unreadable". So there's nothing to be lost here.
Otherwise, you sound like you're only interested in effective contract management, not in the proper development of local government IT - I'm not trying to flame you, but I still think you're missing the point.
We're not the slightest bit interested in either of those. We're interested in delivering services to residents. All the IT is totally ancilliary.
You are coming across as someone who is trying very hard to justify a course that you have already decided on (proprietary).
In fact I would very much like to go with the OS solution, if only we can convince ourselves that it is safe.
but if you are "Eric Ass Raymond", which seems likely
I'm not. I've no idea who he/she/it is.
Think carefully about it and make a decision that is best for your comunity for the long term. Remember that your choice now has long-term ripple effects.
The long term is certainly an important issue. We need to know that what we choose will continue to work and continue to be supported and continue to be developed for the lifetime of the system. This is clouded by the fact that, unusually for local government procurement, we don't know how long the "long term" is, ie we don't know how long this particular software system is likely to be needed in our operations.
This is rather different to buying a dustbin lorry (I think that might translate to "refuse truck" in American?), another sort of procurement decision that councillors have to agree, where we know both that we will still have a need for such a device in seven years' time and that the device we buy is going to last seven years (and that the platform on which it runs - the road network - isn't going to change beyond recognition in that timescale).
refusing to consider free and open software
No, read my original post, I am not "refusing to consider", I am disappointed that it's not making a better case for itself as there is a distinct possibility that it is actually the best answer.
The reason we don't have an in-house IT department any more is, I'm told (it was before my time), because once upon a time a mainframe came to the end of its useful life and needed replacing, and government would not provide the money (a small district council can't afford that sort of thing from its own resources). The only option was outsourcing.
Incidentally, take a look at Cambridgeshire County sometime - they do some good work.
I'm afraid I really can't reply to this, and I can't even give any hints as to why not, and I'm not going to respond to any guesses.
Presumably he was at Microsoft
... indeed sometimes they never noticed whether or not I was physically in their office ... one day I was having an email discussion with someone and he ended up saying "I can't explain any better by email, why don't you walk over to my desk and I'll show you" and it was only that that point that I told him I hadn't been physically present in the same office all week!
Some of the time. Other times I connected via VPN over cable modem from my own office
Go to the URL, find the name and email of the primary author of the software and send him an email. In your email, explain the situation and invite him for a consultation. Offer to pay airfare and expenses and, perhaps, a small consulting fee for the day. Your total expense for this will be insignificant compared to the procurement costs for commercial software.
This is a public service procurement. If we did that for one potential supplier we'd have to do it for all of them, otherwise they'd sue when they lost the business.
According to your web site and resume, it appears that you are an independent software engineer, not a representative of government procurement.
In the UK being a councillor is a voluntary activity. Some councillors do do it full time, being retired or otherwise unemployed or unemployable, but there are plenty of us who have day jobs. Having a day job as a software engineer doesn't stop me being an unpaid part time councillor, and my colleagues seem to think that as I know something about software I should be on the IT committee, so I am.
Your CV even shows that you used to work at Microsoft itself.
This is not a secret - I declare it at meetings from time to time when relevant. It's not relevant to this particular procurement exercise because Microsoft don't have a relevant product.
However rather than posting vague generalizations about not being impressed, why don't you post what the open source application is that you are testing?
Oh, you know, EU public service procurement fairness rules and all that, it would probably b*gg*r up the entire process if I were to discuss the details of the products and suppliers under consideration. Daft, isn't it, but those are the rules.
You want a salesman's visit. You want a brochure...
If you read carefully you will see that I didn't say that. But I do need something other than being pointed at a URL to a demo system with no online help.
You want a demo from an expert..Can't get those from open source product consultants can we?
Apparently not. This I find considerably more disappointing than the absence of a brochure. Although I gather the consultant is having another go at trying to set this up, so I'm hoping for improvement here.
What if a commercial product cannot do what you want? Will the manufacturer tailor it just for you?
That's not my point. My point is that with a typical decent commercial product (OK, there are plenty of crap commercial products as well, let's not be silly about this) it is vastly easier to find out whether or not it can do what I want starting with, yes, the bullet points on the brochure - a first pass over a pile of brochures makes it easy to reject those that don't have a whole section of functionality that you need, or those that are clearly aimed too far up-market or too far down-market, or those that are aimed at a different market altogether.
As far as I can see Blair does not appear to have any particular interest in local government, and it is indeed all done by Prescott and his department. And then they're really only interested in London councils, and make and bend the rules in order to play politics with London councils, as the world outside London doesn't exist.
Of course the world outside London does exist, and there are lots of councils outside London, and they are caught by rules which seem completely daft and irrelevant and bizarre until you have managed to work out which parochial little London squabble caused them to be invented.
So far I am not impressed.
I'm not unimpressed witht the software; the difficulty is in getting a handle on what the software can and can't do and confidence that what it can't do will be fixed.
When you're buying commercial software you get some or all of
- a visit from a salesman
- product brochures
- a demonstration from an expert in the product
- documentation
- comprehensive on line help
- a road map or new features release plan
- clarity as to what you do and don't get in the support contract
and so on.With this open source offering we appear to be getting few or none of the above: "here's the URL for the demo system, go and play with it". Um yes. Thanks. Not, I fear, a basis on which a public authority can spend lots of tax payers' money on a service for tax payers.
Whilst it seems entirely possible that the open source offering is well designed to meet our needs it also seems entirely possible that it will be unable to demonstrate this to an acceptable risk profile so we'll have to buy something else. The competitors, as usual, include paying for a managed service elsewhere or buying commercial software.
You usually win an election by winning on differential turnout - getting your people to turn out and the opposition to stay at home. Usually you don't win by persuading people to change their vote.
In Brent East the four hundred activists were told "go out and get 20 votes each and we've won". They succeeded. But the opposition didn't; hence result.
The next EU election will be on June 13th, 2004
Depends where you live. June 10th in the UK, we don't do Sunday elections. What's more, the government has moved the UK local elections from May to 10th June in an attempt to increase turnout at the European elections, on the grounds that people will go out to vote for their local councils and might as well vote for the European parliament at the same time.
The other theory, the one I believe, is that people will think "oh, it's the European election today, how boring" and stay at home, so the net result will be a decrease in turnout for the local elections.
My Phone is a tri-band
Exactly. It's ludicrous that the rest of the world has to go out and buy different phones that are not needed anywhere else just because the USA won't follow standards. Cheaper dual band phones cope with the whole of the rest of the world just fine.
The fact that the different more expensive phone needed in the USA happens to use the same protocols but in a different waveband, rather than a completely different protocol, is only of interest to nerds; what ordinary punters know is they've got to buy a different phone because normal phones that work in the rest of the world don't work in the USA.
Because there are real live people flying around up there, that's why not. I don't want to kill myself by being flown into by one of those toys.
I prefer slightly worse stuff to perfectly consistent stuff in many ways. It forces constant change, fights off stagnation, etcetera.
Fine. Just so long as you don't mind crashed spaceships and being unable to make phone calls. (What *do* Americans do when travelling abroad? - their phones won't work at all anywhere. Actually perhaps they don't notice this, as their phones only work a bit on a good day at home anyway.)
Um, yes, perhaps.
... and laugh or weep to taste. (I have this phone which works in 199 countries of the world and doesn't work in one, which is ... guess which? Likewise there's just one county in the world which uses strange paper sizes ... just one country which is so wedded to Imperial units that it crashes spacecraft in preference to following international standards ... and so on and so on ...)
Remember the reaction of the average American to an international standard is to denounce it as a communist plot, particularly if one of the European standards bodies takes an interest (or even ISO, which most Americans regard as European and therefore communist).
If you want an example of how well Americans make good use of international standards you just have to look at their mobile phone system
Now, if most operating system manufacturers were European and Japanese this would be a good idea, because they'd be likely to follow any new international standard. But it happens to be a fact of life that many operating systems are produced or contributed to by Americans, so any such idea is dead in the water before it gets off the ground.
Some months after the original story I was at some dinner or other at which some Cambridge physicists were present, so we asked them their views.
"Well," they said, "we've set it up in the lab, and it gets hot." Then they shrugged and talked about something else. (I don't remember who this was or I'd maybe ask them what their views are now.)
Could you please specify why you think that there is a lack of freedom of speech in Germany in this case?
Well, it seems to me[1] that comments posted on this site about Microsoft (to pick an example at random) are much "worse" (in terms of being both rude and lacking in verifiable accuracy) than anything SCO has said, but the denizens of Slashdot seem to approach the two rather differently.
Denizens of Slashdot seem to support the freedom to say rude things about other people in the USA but to applaud the inability to say similar rude things about different other people in Germany. My comment was about the double standards of posters here, not really about German law.
[1] Yes that was me posting as AC earlier (from another machine, haven't a clue what my password is).
The UK isn't the USA, you know - there's hardly any unrestricted airspace round here, and these things will add another set of hazards.
...
Soon there'll be nowhere left to fly
Here's how you do it:
(1) build in a conservation area
(2) wait several hundred years
(3) the house will have to be maintained properly as it will be illegal to pull it down or let it fall down.
... well, the most blatant one anyway, is that Niven can do characters and Asimov can't - they're all cardboard.