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To put this into context, open source was previously deigned not acceptable in large swathes of government due to procurement and liability problems. HMG civil

by iuguy 14y ago

To put this into context, open source was previously deigned not acceptable in large swathes of government due to procurement and liability problems. HMG civil servants have mostly developed an inate and enviable skill in blame deflection, non-answering and political maneuvering mostly due to the politicisation of their day jobs. It's an odd world out there. So by forcing them to consider FOSS this is the government's attempt to put it right. If they just told people that FOSS was now acceptable, people in some parts of HMG would still use closed source software in case the wind changes again. What's bad is that departments appear to be excessively pressured into open source, which is not a good idea. It's important to go for the best tool for the job and the things you can manage the most effectively, which might not always be open source.

DanI-S 14y ago
> What's bad is that departments appear to be excessively pressured into open source, which is not a good idea. It's important to go for the best tool for the job and the things you can manage the most effectively, which might not always be open source. That wasn't the impression I got from the article: “We believe open source isn't properly considered when we are doing IT. Our objective is not to have a target for open source in government – a year on year increase. Our objective is to best explore the opportunities out there. Sometimes that might be open source. At the moment, we believe we are missing out on the opportunities.” Based on that quote, it sounds like they are taking a surprisingly well considered approach. Is this not the case in some departments?
- iuguy 14y ago
  I can only talk about my own experiences, but given the pushes for cuts in costs open source is now being touted around some places as being the way to go, regardless of best tool for the job. As I said, HMG is a very strange place and it's big too, so not everything will be the same, but I've seen a couple of projects in the past 12 months where people have come back and challenged the decision to go with things like Oracle DB versus MySQL and so on. Once you're getting accused of flagrant spending (worse than death in some bits of HMG) on licences, you tend to over-cut.
slurgfest 14y ago
In almost every case I agree with the slogan 'use the best tool for the job.' But governments are a special case because they are using involuntarily-given public money and have a mandate to represent all citizens' interests and contribute to the public good. Funneling public money to corporations in the form of contracts is a great nexus of corruption. The duty of a government is to the people, not to prop up (say) Microsoft, which provides services but also manipulates the market. Any government which can build billions of dollars of military hardware annually can fix up or devise open source software. And then there is publicly usable software rather than JUST the perpetuation of a private company's strategy for claiming public money.

by iuguy 14y ago

DanI-S 14y ago

> What's bad is that departments appear to be excessively pressured into open source, which is not a good idea. It's important to go for the best tool for the job and the things you can manage the most effectively, which might not always be open source. That wasn't the impression I got from the article: “We believe open source isn't properly considered when we are doing IT. Our objective is not to have a target for open source in government – a year on year increase. Our objective is to best explore the opportunities out there. Sometimes that might be open source. At the moment, we believe we are missing out on the opportunities.” Based on that quote, it sounds like they are taking a surprisingly well considered approach. Is this not the case in some departments?

iuguy 14y ago
I can only talk about my own experiences, but given the pushes for cuts in costs open source is now being touted around some places as being the way to go, regardless of best tool for the job. As I said, HMG is a very strange place and it's big too, so not everything will be the same, but I've seen a couple of projects in the past 12 months where people have come back and challenged the decision to go with things like Oracle DB versus MySQL and so on. Once you're getting accused of flagrant spending (worse than death in some bits of HMG) on licences, you tend to over-cut.

slurgfest 14y ago

In almost every case I agree with the slogan 'use the best tool for the job.' But governments are a special case because they are using involuntarily-given public money and have a mandate to represent all citizens' interests and contribute to the public good. Funneling public money to corporations in the form of contracts is a great nexus of corruption. The duty of a government is to the people, not to prop up (say) Microsoft, which provides services but also manipulates the market. Any government which can build billions of dollars of military hardware annually can fix up or devise open source software. And then there is publicly usable software rather than JUST the perpetuation of a private company's strategy for claiming public money.