7 ms·

UK Government Betrayal of Open Standards Confirmed

tehwalrus 15y ago
As a Lib Dem, I'm actually very embarrassed about this. Especially since it was Vince Cable's department (BIS) who seems to have led the charge against OSS from within government. Ridiculous.
- JackdawX 15y ago
  Are you a lib dem member or supporter? As someone who had optimistically voted for the lib dems in the last election, I think there are plenty of reasons for them to be embarrassed about their time in power. Anti-tech, anti-education policies are being proposed that we were led to believe the Lib Dems would be tempering, but from the point of view of the average person I can't see anything of the sort happening.
  - tehwalrus 15y ago
    Member and campaigner. We have a major perception problem on that score - the work our ministers do tempering policy is inside the opaque government bubble, and the public (and indeed activists like me) have no idea who thought what before the unified public face of government is presented. People on our democratic, party wide Federal Policy Committee have a better idea, because they're called in before decisions go public (I was astonished when I learned this, and greatly encouraged!) I sincerely hope that the coalition process is made more open before we get to a 2015 "but we were saying this in private"-match during the election campaign (which would leave us looking either disingenuous, weak, or both.) (Edited for grammar.)
    - toyg 15y ago
      If what you are saying is correct, then policy proposals from the Tories are even more insane than what bubbles up, which makes the whole idea of being in power with them even more distasteful. Considering the AV referendum is now gone, what's the point of staying with them any longer, apart from the occasional ministerial pension ?
      - tehwalrus 15y ago
        What is the point of being in government and actually having influence over decisions that affect the lives of millions of people? Power is a device to improve the world - you hold onto it for as long as you can to do the most good you can. Obviously "as long as you can" is defined in terms of democratic parameters (without which people would do significantly less good with their power.) If tory policy is even more insane (scrapping all employment law, anyone* ?) then that makes it even more important for us to be in there fixing it. * - no, really, from one of Cameron's advisers.
        robhu 15y ago
        Do you have a citation for the claim that 'scrapping all employment law' was a Tory policy? Or do you mean that it was the viewpoint of one advisor (and so not Tory policy), or even that one advisor said something that might be construed in that way, or entertained the idea of such a thing?
        stuaxo 15y ago
        Found them suggesting scraping unfair dismissal laws: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/10/26/unfair-dismissal-law-scra_n_1032144.html http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/10/26/unfair-dismissal-...
        robhu 15y ago
        The original claim made was "If tory policy is even more insane (scrapping all employment law, anyone* ?)", "* - no, really, from one of Cameron's advisers." According to the article this was never Tory policy, so that is false. The Huffington Post are a second hand source here, reporting on something in the Telegraph. The details of course aren't available in either, but what is in the Telegraph (who actually saw the thing) look more reasonable (whether one agrees with the gist of it is another thing). It's also rather misleading to say "one of Cameron's advisors" which implies this is a paid employee, rather than a successful businessman who has been asked to make a report (I imagine the government ask for and receive many reports most of which they ignore or only take elements of).
    - robhu 15y ago
      This sounds a bit suspicious to me - saying that the Lib Dems are the good guys who are tempering the bad policies of the Conservatives, but as it's all done in secret we can't see how good they are. The Lib Dems pledged to oppose tuition fee rises for instance but in fact raised them from £3k to £9k, and apparently /planned/ to do so before coming in to power http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2010/11/14/lib-dems-plotted-tuition-fees-u-turn-before-g http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2010/11/14/lib-dems-plotted-t...
      - tehwalrus 15y ago
        Well, it's my opinion. politics is the definition of subjective, alas! "The Lib Dems" don't 'plan' stuff like that. We're a distributed party without any kind of hierarchy of command (to the extent that local parties often contradict one another, much to our opponents' mirth.) We have people at different levels making different decisions about policy for that level, sure, but we're not obliged to agree with people up the chain (as I certainly didn't and don't on Tuition Fees.) My local party, for example, strengthened a Labour council motion condemning the NHS bill, partly due to my urging. Clegg was only ever a reluctant supporter of the Tuition Fees policy, but the NUS pledge was the NUS pledge, and all our candidates everywhere chose to sign it, including him. And 14 kept it and voted against the bill, too.
        robhu 15y ago
        The Lib Dems have a reputation for saying whatever people want to hear, and it was suggested before the election that they would turn around when they were in power. I didn't think so so I voted for them, but I've now learned the error of my ways. Clegg's lies about the tuition fees policy is but one example. I doubt the public will be fooled a second time.
        tehwalrus 15y ago
        I'm sad you think so. So what we say/said on Europe, on Immigration, and on the Deficit even before the election, that was all "what people wanted to hear" was it? Tuition fees was technically a lie, because all our MPs signed a "pledge" which some of them (more than half) then broke by voting for it or abstaining. However, other examples are hard to find, because compromising on a manifesto to form a coalition is a legitimate reason to diverge from "what we said" in "what we're doing." The Guardian did some analysis (which I can't seem to find now) that said something like 60% of our manifesto was being delivered under the coalition. I think that's pretty good going for the smaller partner, and while some of what the government is doing makes me good and angry (DLA 'assessments,' housing benefit changes especially in London, Tuition Fees, scrapping of PCTs, and so on), other bits are much better for it (the Tuition Fees repayment system, the Pupil Premium which was doubled again recently, raising the income tax threshold, the Youth Contract, and so on.)
- mjwalshe 15y ago
  err actually I think you (lib dems) have a lot more to worry about than some pious (used in its political sense here) belief by OS Zellots and hobby programmers that some how Open Office is a better solution than MS Office for a huge (largely non technical) user base. The cost of a MS licence is so tiny when compared to the cost of employing some one - and when you factor in the cost of retraining it makes very good sense - whose hospitals or schools would you close to pay for all this.
  - tehwalrus 15y ago
    This is about defending the coalition agreement, which has aspirations about open source software and open data in it that come straight out of the Lib Dem policy book. Admittedly Europe wasn't (and OSS/Open Standards wouldn't be) the most electorally-useful topic to pick a fight on, but since when have Lib Dems ever done anything the easy way. It's our policy, I and some of our voters care about it, and we won the concession off the tories during the coalition negotiation. That should be enough to make us fight for it, when the time comes.
  - jsmcgd 15y ago
    Where governments are concerned, MS Office licences can be huge and will always be more expensive than free. They will always always be more restrictive too than free software, by definition. I agree that a licence by itself won't be the biggest expense a government will have, but the sleazy insidious contracts that they are normally bundled with are the most dangerous aspects licensed software. One example: why do so many government institutions still use IE6? It's because of the eye-watering expenses they're obliged to pay to upgrade their own systems. This type of type of contractual bondage must end. Especially when it comes to tax payers money. Unnecessary licences for sub standard MS software comes out of the same purse as that used to pay for life saving operations. It's always worth bearing this in mind.
    - mjwalshe 15y ago
      Its not cheaper if you have to retain a lot of people - and Open office is not well liked by ordinary users "its shit" was one comment by a coworker at my last place And look at any advert for a Govenment IT project its always to many chiefs and not enough experianced devlopers. IE6 lock in is due to cheap and shoddy work by the "outsourced" developers and a lack of technical nous (incopentance being more blunt) in the specification stage PPI has a lot to answer for.
jwcacces 15y ago
The problem with this article is the sensationalism. Did Microsoft lobby? Certainty, did they "interfere with a sovereign nation's decision to create a level playing-field"? Please, give me a break, they interfered with your desire to do something, and whether right or wrong, the last time I checked, you weren't a sovereign nation.
- jahewson 15y ago
  The UK is a sovereign nation.
  - jwcacces 15y ago
    Yes, but the author is not. Lobbying is lobbying. It is not interfering. That's my point.
    - tankenmate 15y ago
      Considering that both the Conservatives and Lib Dems were trumpeting this before the elections only to drop it afterwards smacks of either deceit or stupidity; take your pick.
      - estel 15y ago
        Trumpeting? It might have been touted as an element of policy after questioning, but "support for open standards" is never going to be a vote-winner in an election.
        toyg 15y ago
        There is a large number of UK geeks who genuinely believed Tories and (especially) LibDems would have reduced the influence of Microsoft on public procurement once elected. I know because I've been surprised by this over and over (I live in the North of England, where being a Tory is, er, very unpopular by default, and with reason). For them, this issue was indeed a vote-winner, so this u-turn will hurt, especially among LibDems... but then again, hardly surprising by now.
tomelders 15y ago
Just emailed 10 Downing street asking for an explanation, if they have one. I encourage other people to do the same.
- pyre 15y ago
  Don't expect anything but a canned response. Something like, "We reviewed all the available options, and feel that Microsoft is the best solution for us."
Silhouette 15y ago
Point of order: Please be careful to distinguish between the concepts of open standards, portable data, and Open Source software in this discussion.
- tehwalrus 15y ago
  Indeed, I hadn't spotted the difference - thanks. Reading the linked articles, the Free Software lobby is saying that this decision will destroy the coalition agreement commitment to create a level playing field ( http://www.direct.gov.uk/prod_consum_dg/groups/dg_digitalassets/@dg/@en/documents/digitalasset/dg_187876.pdf http://www.direct.gov.uk/prod_consum_dg/groups/dg_digitalass... p21, "Government Transparency", 8th bullet,) which may or may not be true. Given that the argument is all about patent royalties on interfaces, though, that argument (that OSS, which doesn't do royalties ever, won't stand a chance) seems to hold water to me.
- brudgers 15y ago
  The article essentially lumps them together under the rubric of "not Microsoft."
mjwalshe 15y ago
I know we have to use this shoddy half assed TCP/IP instead on the nice ITU/ISO standrads that all the countries agreed to years back :-)
- kabdib 15y ago
  (laughter) Yeah, the people behind OSI should be forced to use the standards they designed :-)
  - mjwalshe 15y ago
    well we did it was just you uppity Subs that spoiled that :-) I
JS_startup 15y ago
The author certainly didn't make an attempt at being objective or hiding his allegiances. Most humorous is his assertion that businesses should have no voice in the decisions of government because that is "interfering"
fractallyte 15y ago
Considering how the previous government blew 12 BILLION pounds of the nation's money on the infamous NHS project (http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ifs/Teaching/Socio-tech-systems(LSCITS)/Reading/PrivateEye.pdf http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ifs/Teaching/Socio-tech-syst...), I'd have thought they should now be treading very, very carefully in matters of national IT policy...
jiggy2011 15y ago
This article is a little vague. Personally as a UK Taxpayer I don't really care whether the desktop PCs and downing street or Whitehall run Windows , Linux or Mac they could run Haiku for all I care. What I am more concerned about as more government functions can be interfaced with online is whether this will be done using the most standard and open data formats etc possible. If I need to buy a specific piece of proprietary software to submit my tax information online or if all applications for public sector jobs are distributed in the latest MS Word format that I can't open without buying a new version of Windows and office then that is something I at least potentially care about.
- DrCatbox 15y ago
  "f I need to buy a specific piece of proprietary software to submit my tax information online or if all applications for public sector jobs are distributed in the latest MS Word format that I can't open without buying a new version of Windows and office then that is something I at least potentially care about." Thats the point of this Microsofts lobbying, lock-in. Can you today require open documents from your government? Here in Sweden, no. You get .doc most of the time, if it is a local government then perhaps a PDF.
  - jiggy2011 15y ago
    For the most part you can, sometimes you will get a .doc it's almost always available in another format or it's an old enough .doc format that opening it is not an issue. You can also grab lots of data from parliament in XML format and people have done some cool things with it (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ http://www.theyworkforyou.com/) for example. There's lots of government depts that can be interacted with using various XML formats and they will provide you with all the schemas you need.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
- pavelkaroukin 15y ago
  IMHO, these are not the only reasons you should be worried about. Pushing more microsoft proprietary software into local government means more your tax dollars will go to usa (not to usa government, probably, since there are so many tax schemes available). On the other hand integrating open source software in organizations usually done with help of local companies, meaning your tax dollars spend on work your neighbor do. Since in this case you are not paying for "product", you are paying for integration of open source software. (as a bonus, it often also saves bucks on software products, even if you pay more for integration/training). ps: not saying that during process of integration of open source software often changes/bug reports/feedback contributed back to open source community, which benefits all people...
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
hammock 15y ago
Can someone summarize what is going on in layman's terms?
- tehwalrus 15y ago
  The UK government is rolling back on a proposal to require that interfaces between components of Government purchased software comply with Open Standards (i.e. ones without attached patents). This would prevent Open Source components being used (since they don't ever use patented Standards, since there is no vendor to pay royalties) and thus renege on a part of the "Government Transparency" section of the coalition agreement, which stated that Open Source Software should be given a level playing field in government procurement.
runn1ng 15y ago
Isn't Office Open XML (Microsoft Office's XML format) an open standard, too? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_...

As a Lib Dem, I'm actually very embarrassed about this. Especially since it was Vince Cable's department (BIS) who seems to have led the charge against OSS from within government. Ridiculous.

JackdawX 15y ago
Are you a lib dem member or supporter? As someone who had optimistically voted for the lib dems in the last election, I think there are plenty of reasons for them to be embarrassed about their time in power. Anti-tech, anti-education policies are being proposed that we were led to believe the Lib Dems would be tempering, but from the point of view of the average person I can't see anything of the sort happening.
- tehwalrus 15y ago
  Member and campaigner. We have a major perception problem on that score - the work our ministers do tempering policy is inside the opaque government bubble, and the public (and indeed activists like me) have no idea who thought what before the unified public face of government is presented. People on our democratic, party wide Federal Policy Committee have a better idea, because they're called in before decisions go public (I was astonished when I learned this, and greatly encouraged!) I sincerely hope that the coalition process is made more open before we get to a 2015 "but we were saying this in private"-match during the election campaign (which would leave us looking either disingenuous, weak, or both.) (Edited for grammar.)
  - toyg 15y ago
    If what you are saying is correct, then policy proposals from the Tories are even more insane than what bubbles up, which makes the whole idea of being in power with them even more distasteful. Considering the AV referendum is now gone, what's the point of staying with them any longer, apart from the occasional ministerial pension ?
    - tehwalrus 15y ago
      What is the point of being in government and actually having influence over decisions that affect the lives of millions of people? Power is a device to improve the world - you hold onto it for as long as you can to do the most good you can. Obviously "as long as you can" is defined in terms of democratic parameters (without which people would do significantly less good with their power.) If tory policy is even more insane (scrapping all employment law, anyone* ?) then that makes it even more important for us to be in there fixing it. * - no, really, from one of Cameron's advisers.
      - robhu 15y ago
        Do you have a citation for the claim that 'scrapping all employment law' was a Tory policy? Or do you mean that it was the viewpoint of one advisor (and so not Tory policy), or even that one advisor said something that might be construed in that way, or entertained the idea of such a thing?
        stuaxo 15y ago
        Found them suggesting scraping unfair dismissal laws: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/10/26/unfair-dismissal-law-scra_n_1032144.html http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/10/26/unfair-dismissal-...
        robhu 15y ago
        The original claim made was "If tory policy is even more insane (scrapping all employment law, anyone* ?)", "* - no, really, from one of Cameron's advisers." According to the article this was never Tory policy, so that is false. The Huffington Post are a second hand source here, reporting on something in the Telegraph. The details of course aren't available in either, but what is in the Telegraph (who actually saw the thing) look more reasonable (whether one agrees with the gist of it is another thing). It's also rather misleading to say "one of Cameron's advisors" which implies this is a paid employee, rather than a successful businessman who has been asked to make a report (I imagine the government ask for and receive many reports most of which they ignore or only take elements of).
  - robhu 15y ago
    This sounds a bit suspicious to me - saying that the Lib Dems are the good guys who are tempering the bad policies of the Conservatives, but as it's all done in secret we can't see how good they are. The Lib Dems pledged to oppose tuition fee rises for instance but in fact raised them from £3k to £9k, and apparently /planned/ to do so before coming in to power http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2010/11/14/lib-dems-plotted-tuition-fees-u-turn-before-g http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2010/11/14/lib-dems-plotted-t...
    - tehwalrus 15y ago
      Well, it's my opinion. politics is the definition of subjective, alas! "The Lib Dems" don't 'plan' stuff like that. We're a distributed party without any kind of hierarchy of command (to the extent that local parties often contradict one another, much to our opponents' mirth.) We have people at different levels making different decisions about policy for that level, sure, but we're not obliged to agree with people up the chain (as I certainly didn't and don't on Tuition Fees.) My local party, for example, strengthened a Labour council motion condemning the NHS bill, partly due to my urging. Clegg was only ever a reluctant supporter of the Tuition Fees policy, but the NUS pledge was the NUS pledge, and all our candidates everywhere chose to sign it, including him. And 14 kept it and voted against the bill, too.
      - robhu 15y ago
        The Lib Dems have a reputation for saying whatever people want to hear, and it was suggested before the election that they would turn around when they were in power. I didn't think so so I voted for them, but I've now learned the error of my ways. Clegg's lies about the tuition fees policy is but one example. I doubt the public will be fooled a second time.
        tehwalrus 15y ago
        I'm sad you think so. So what we say/said on Europe, on Immigration, and on the Deficit even before the election, that was all "what people wanted to hear" was it? Tuition fees was technically a lie, because all our MPs signed a "pledge" which some of them (more than half) then broke by voting for it or abstaining. However, other examples are hard to find, because compromising on a manifesto to form a coalition is a legitimate reason to diverge from "what we said" in "what we're doing." The Guardian did some analysis (which I can't seem to find now) that said something like 60% of our manifesto was being delivered under the coalition. I think that's pretty good going for the smaller partner, and while some of what the government is doing makes me good and angry (DLA 'assessments,' housing benefit changes especially in London, Tuition Fees, scrapping of PCTs, and so on), other bits are much better for it (the Tuition Fees repayment system, the Pupil Premium which was doubled again recently, raising the income tax threshold, the Youth Contract, and so on.)
mjwalshe 15y ago
err actually I think you (lib dems) have a lot more to worry about than some pious (used in its political sense here) belief by OS Zellots and hobby programmers that some how Open Office is a better solution than MS Office for a huge (largely non technical) user base. The cost of a MS licence is so tiny when compared to the cost of employing some one - and when you factor in the cost of retraining it makes very good sense - whose hospitals or schools would you close to pay for all this.
- tehwalrus 15y ago
  This is about defending the coalition agreement, which has aspirations about open source software and open data in it that come straight out of the Lib Dem policy book. Admittedly Europe wasn't (and OSS/Open Standards wouldn't be) the most electorally-useful topic to pick a fight on, but since when have Lib Dems ever done anything the easy way. It's our policy, I and some of our voters care about it, and we won the concession off the tories during the coalition negotiation. That should be enough to make us fight for it, when the time comes.
- jsmcgd 15y ago
  Where governments are concerned, MS Office licences can be huge and will always be more expensive than free. They will always always be more restrictive too than free software, by definition. I agree that a licence by itself won't be the biggest expense a government will have, but the sleazy insidious contracts that they are normally bundled with are the most dangerous aspects licensed software. One example: why do so many government institutions still use IE6? It's because of the eye-watering expenses they're obliged to pay to upgrade their own systems. This type of type of contractual bondage must end. Especially when it comes to tax payers money. Unnecessary licences for sub standard MS software comes out of the same purse as that used to pay for life saving operations. It's always worth bearing this in mind.
  - mjwalshe 15y ago
    Its not cheaper if you have to retain a lot of people - and Open office is not well liked by ordinary users "its shit" was one comment by a coworker at my last place And look at any advert for a Govenment IT project its always to many chiefs and not enough experianced devlopers. IE6 lock in is due to cheap and shoddy work by the "outsourced" developers and a lack of technical nous (incopentance being more blunt) in the specification stage PPI has a lot to answer for.

jwcacces 15y ago

The problem with this article is the sensationalism. Did Microsoft lobby? Certainty, did they "interfere with a sovereign nation's decision to create a level playing-field"? Please, give me a break, they interfered with your desire to do something, and whether right or wrong, the last time I checked, you weren't a sovereign nation.

jahewson 15y ago
The UK is a sovereign nation.
- jwcacces 15y ago
  Yes, but the author is not. Lobbying is lobbying. It is not interfering. That's my point.
  - tankenmate 15y ago
    Considering that both the Conservatives and Lib Dems were trumpeting this before the elections only to drop it afterwards smacks of either deceit or stupidity; take your pick.
    - estel 15y ago
      Trumpeting? It might have been touted as an element of policy after questioning, but "support for open standards" is never going to be a vote-winner in an election.
      - toyg 15y ago
        There is a large number of UK geeks who genuinely believed Tories and (especially) LibDems would have reduced the influence of Microsoft on public procurement once elected. I know because I've been surprised by this over and over (I live in the North of England, where being a Tory is, er, very unpopular by default, and with reason). For them, this issue was indeed a vote-winner, so this u-turn will hurt, especially among LibDems... but then again, hardly surprising by now.

tomelders 15y ago

Just emailed 10 Downing street asking for an explanation, if they have one. I encourage other people to do the same.

pyre 15y ago
Don't expect anything but a canned response. Something like, "We reviewed all the available options, and feel that Microsoft is the best solution for us."

Silhouette 15y ago

Point of order: Please be careful to distinguish between the concepts of open standards, portable data, and Open Source software in this discussion.

tehwalrus 15y ago
Indeed, I hadn't spotted the difference - thanks. Reading the linked articles, the Free Software lobby is saying that this decision will destroy the coalition agreement commitment to create a level playing field ( http://www.direct.gov.uk/prod_consum_dg/groups/dg_digitalassets/@dg/@en/documents/digitalasset/dg_187876.pdf http://www.direct.gov.uk/prod_consum_dg/groups/dg_digitalass... p21, "Government Transparency", 8th bullet,) which may or may not be true. Given that the argument is all about patent royalties on interfaces, though, that argument (that OSS, which doesn't do royalties ever, won't stand a chance) seems to hold water to me.
brudgers 15y ago
The article essentially lumps them together under the rubric of "not Microsoft."

mjwalshe 15y ago

I know we have to use this shoddy half assed TCP/IP instead on the nice ITU/ISO standrads that all the countries agreed to years back :-)

kabdib 15y ago
(laughter) Yeah, the people behind OSI should be forced to use the standards they designed :-)
- mjwalshe 15y ago
  well we did it was just you uppity Subs that spoiled that :-) I

JS_startup 15y ago

The author certainly didn't make an attempt at being objective or hiding his allegiances. Most humorous is his assertion that businesses should have no voice in the decisions of government because that is "interfering"

fractallyte 15y ago

Considering how the previous government blew 12 BILLION pounds of the nation's money on the infamous NHS project (http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ifs/Teaching/Socio-tech-systems(LSCITS)/Reading/PrivateEye.pdf http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ifs/Teaching/Socio-tech-syst...), I'd have thought they should now be treading very, very carefully in matters of national IT policy...

jiggy2011 15y ago

This article is a little vague. Personally as a UK Taxpayer I don't really care whether the desktop PCs and downing street or Whitehall run Windows , Linux or Mac they could run Haiku for all I care. What I am more concerned about as more government functions can be interfaced with online is whether this will be done using the most standard and open data formats etc possible. If I need to buy a specific piece of proprietary software to submit my tax information online or if all applications for public sector jobs are distributed in the latest MS Word format that I can't open without buying a new version of Windows and office then that is something I at least potentially care about.

DrCatbox 15y ago
"f I need to buy a specific piece of proprietary software to submit my tax information online or if all applications for public sector jobs are distributed in the latest MS Word format that I can't open without buying a new version of Windows and office then that is something I at least potentially care about." Thats the point of this Microsofts lobbying, lock-in. Can you today require open documents from your government? Here in Sweden, no. You get .doc most of the time, if it is a local government then perhaps a PDF.
- jiggy2011 15y ago
  For the most part you can, sometimes you will get a .doc it's almost always available in another format or it's an old enough .doc format that opening it is not an issue. You can also grab lots of data from parliament in XML format and people have done some cool things with it (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ http://www.theyworkforyou.com/) for example. There's lots of government depts that can be interacted with using various XML formats and they will provide you with all the schemas you need.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
pavelkaroukin 15y ago
IMHO, these are not the only reasons you should be worried about. Pushing more microsoft proprietary software into local government means more your tax dollars will go to usa (not to usa government, probably, since there are so many tax schemes available). On the other hand integrating open source software in organizations usually done with help of local companies, meaning your tax dollars spend on work your neighbor do. Since in this case you are not paying for "product", you are paying for integration of open source software. (as a bonus, it often also saves bucks on software products, even if you pay more for integration/training). ps: not saying that during process of integration of open source software often changes/bug reports/feedback contributed back to open source community, which benefits all people...

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

hammock 15y ago

Can someone summarize what is going on in layman's terms?

tehwalrus 15y ago
The UK government is rolling back on a proposal to require that interfaces between components of Government purchased software comply with Open Standards (i.e. ones without attached patents). This would prevent Open Source components being used (since they don't ever use patented Standards, since there is no vendor to pay royalties) and thus renege on a part of the "Government Transparency" section of the coalition agreement, which stated that Open Source Software should be given a level playing field in government procurement.

runn1ng 15y ago

Isn't Office Open XML (Microsoft Office's XML format) an open standard, too? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_...