Politics

The Linux Insurgency

Insurgent methodology clearly fascinates master tactician Peter Mandelson who recently urged the UK Government to behave more like insurgents in order to beat the Conservative Party in the forthcoming election. Superficially, it is a mildly bizarre statement but maybe not.

General McChrsytal no less believes that the US is in real danger of never being able to beat the Talebs... unless they find the 'right strategy'. Pretty shocking statement that.

Selling Open Source software into the Public Sector

Why is it so hard to sell Free, Open Source solutions into the Public Sector especially Local Authorities?

You would have thought that it would be easy - after all FOSS solutions for services such as e-mail, collaboration software, and learning platforms are demonstrably cheaper and more effective than their proprietary equivalents.

You would also be encouraged by the Government mandating that all public sector IT procurements show that due consideration has been given to Open Source solutions alongside proprietary ones.

Information Technology becomes a UK Election Issue

With an election on the horizon both the Conservatives and Labour are increasingly triangulating on issues they believe will win them votes. This is business-as-usual, but what is remarkable this time round is that Information Technology is heading for centre stage in the game.

Never before has ICT been considered political, but after a long string of Government projects most observers would characterise as failed or failing, absurdly late, and obscenely expensive it has earnt it's place.

It's political - a measure of both a Government's competence and it's financial acumen - both key issues in an election.

Software vendors and the UK Government: how to peer behind the scenes

In the Open Source world we are rarely privy to what goes on behind closed doors in the world of ICT in UK gov. However, we have been remarkably 'lucky' over the years to fish out just what is going on. By popular request here's how it's done: The Spencer System.

This is my own system used for detective work when dealing with official releases written or spoken in Mandarin-Speak. They invariably consist of: lies (verifiable and non verifiable); 'economical truths'; weasel words; spin and monkey shaking. A glossary is provided at the end for those unfamiliar with the terms.

UK Government ditches Microsoft's Cloud in favour of Open Source?

In a world of spin, smoke and mirrors working out what is 'going down' is not easy and requires the full use of the "Spencer-scale".

At one end of this sale is 'paranoia', just feelings nothing more, moving through 'guessing' to 'speculation' and then on to 'putting two and two together'. At the other end is 'analysis' (of the facts) and ultimately a simple if rare report of the 'knowns'.

Open Source Budget Special

Blueprint for Survival

The No-Brainer

If state schools and other public sector bodies adopted more Free, Open Source Software and low energy thin-client computing they would:

a) suffer no reduction in their quality of provision and

b) save up to 90% of their total ICT costs.

They could do this without upfront costs if they used the money immediately saved from non-renewal of proprietary licences to fund investment in low energy technology.

This assertion has been made before and details of its components have been explained in previous posts. The money thereby saved UK-wide is in the order of many millions of pounds.

Few dispute this nowadays, even the FUD has all but gone, but who cares anymore?

Open Source safety - Tories vindicated

The most surprising thing about George Osborne's recent Open Source announcements was the lack of backlash.

That the UK's Conservative Party, possibly the next government, have endorsed a report that they comissioned, a report that recommends Open Standards, Open Procurement and Open Source as the pillars of a Conservative Government's Public Sector IT policy was, on the whole, accepted as not only inevitable, but in many parts of the IT press regarded as one of the few instances in recent times of a prominent politician talking sense on the subject of IT!

Linux in Schools (Gaza Style)

A January Journey into Wonderland

From an Open Source perspective January has been a very busy, if slightly surreal, start to 2009 and from a blogging perspective it has been not dissimilar to Alice in Wonderland. By this I mean that like Alice, if you follow a rabbit pel mel into a hole you cannot be sure what will emerge.

To illustrate:

Last week we were at the UK's biggest education technology event (BETT) where we found huge amounts of interest in Open Source software, Netbooks and Thin-Client computing; all very gratifying as I have been banging on about this for ages, but events soon took on an unreal feel.

Back to the future and back again with Tux 2000

 

 

A weary early 21st century Microsoft executive travels to the near 'post-recession' future UK and is greeted by an horrific situation:

Computer hardware is now just a commodity product; software is all free and open source and technical support on stable and secure software is merely an insurance policy. Worse, regulation and agreed standards are preventing monopolies from thriving and product interoperability is taken for granted.

Our hero is right to be shocked. Back in 2008 when he left ...