Linux Format forums

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

guy — Sat Oct 10, 2009 5:16 pm

Author: guy

Posted: Sat Oct 10, 2009 5:16 pm

Cheers

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

nordle — Thu Oct 08, 2009 8:21 pm

Author: nordle

Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2009 8:21 pm

http://tinyurl.com/mfwu2q

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

guy — Thu Oct 08, 2009 7:21 pm

Author: guy

Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2009 7:21 pm

Yesterday I heard a news item on the telly:
A council in Birmingham produced such an awful web site that the community got together and made a better one. The council are now considering their options, heh.
Can't remember which council, can't find it on any major news site. Worcestershire County Council could do with the same treatment, it's "hub" update has bombed out something shocking.
Can anybody point me at a url for the Birmingham story?

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

kamrananvaar — Thu Oct 08, 2009 5:56 pm

Author: kamrananvaar

Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2009 5:56 pm

UK: Head of IT development Camden: 'Cooperate with open source communities'
Government procuring open source IT should consider how to benefit from collaborating with open source communities, says Alasdair Mangham, head of Information Systems and Development of the London Borough of Camden in the UK. "We need to learn how to become experts at being members of communities rather than experts at governing them."
http://www.osor.eu/news/uk-head-of-it-development-camden-cooperate-with-open-source-communities

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

guy — Wed Oct 07, 2009 7:27 pm

Author: guy

Posted: Wed Oct 07, 2009 7:27 pm

Lots of IT geeky stuff goes on in the engine rooms of national government departments . The average user tends to get on with their own job, blithely (and usually wrongly) assuming that because they use Windows (TM) and MS Office (TM), all the servers do too.

As for free as in beer, national government is pretty hot on licensing - if anything is unlicensed, it won't be the bureaucrats' fault - probably either a senior droid or a lowly geek - and once unearthed it doesn't last long

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

nordle — Tue Oct 06, 2009 8:37 pm

Author: nordle

Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 8:37 pm

I thought maybe Guy was eluding to the "free as in beer" side.

Any large organisation is quite likely to not be entirely correctly licensed.

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

johnhudson — Tue Oct 06, 2009 6:55 pm

Author: johnhudson

Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 6:55 pm

It wouldn't be the first time.

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

nelz — Tue Oct 06, 2009 1:36 pm

Author: nelz

Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 1:36 pm

Are you suggesting our government doesn't know what it is doing? :-O

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

guy — Mon Oct 05, 2009 7:00 pm

Author: guy

Posted: Mon Oct 05, 2009 7:00 pm

Maybe the UK government is like many large organizations, and already uses a lot of free software server-side, without knowing it.

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

towy71 — Sat Oct 03, 2009 8:54 am

Author: towy71

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2009 8:54 am

nelz wrote:

I don't think the NHS qualifies as a "company committed to open source".

Most of the people running* the NHS should be committed to somewhere else

*politicians

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

nelz — Sat Oct 03, 2009 12:23 am

Author: nelz

Posted: Sat Oct 03, 2009 12:23 am

I don't think the NHS qualifies as a "company committed to open source".

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

CJLL — Fri Oct 02, 2009 10:28 pm

Author: CJLL

Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 10:28 pm

johnhudson wrote:

I once heard that IBM reckoned it would take 5 years for a company committed to open source to migrate completely. Since governments only normally get four years to put their policies into practice, it will never be a government policy for fear the next government will benefit from it - and the costs of migration, e.g. retraining, are primarily up-front; so not really welcome in the current climate.

any sign of the National IT project for the NHS being fully up and running yet? They been at that for the last seven/eight years or so.

I think 5 years is a very big underestimate.

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

johnhudson — Fri Oct 02, 2009 7:37 pm

Author: johnhudson

Posted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 7:37 pm

The costs of migration arise because, while most MS Office to OpenOffice is fairly straightforward, Access to whatever Linux combination you use isn't and there are many other programs which are sufficiently different that failing to plan for the move and identify training needs could be very costly.

This was all studied in the 1980s because companies then assumed that there would be little need to train staff and ended up losing business because their staff hadn't had time to learn enough about the new software to be able to use it effectively.

IBM doesn't say things for nothing; it has decades of experience of the sorts of mistakes people (and it) have made in the past.

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

nordle — Thu Oct 01, 2009 10:04 pm

Author: nordle

Posted: Thu Oct 01, 2009 10:04 pm

My previous employment had guys/gals using very complex Excel models with loads of linked spreadsheets and resulting summary data embeded in Word. Yes they could be moved over, but the time it would take would be huge and everyone is running so close to the bone these days that there just isn't the spare capacity to achieve this, however much it is a good idea.

Re: hope for openness in the UK government begins to sparkle:

towy71 — Thu Oct 01, 2009 8:25 pm

Author: towy71

Posted: Thu Oct 01, 2009 8:25 pm

johnhudson wrote:

..the costs of migration...

I don't unterstand why there should be any intrinsic cost in migrating operating systems if they have been using best practice.
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