[Gllug] Open Source lobbying meeting - UKUUG London Thurs 19th

[John Hearns]

Chris Bell wrote:
>
> 
>    Government and public funded organisations are required to put all
> contracts over a fairly small value out to tender, and you will see them at
> the Official Contracts website,
> 
> http://www.ogc.gov.uk
> 
>    It is up to the Open Source community to read the list, decide if and how
> a job could be done, and submit tenders before the deadline, but this can be
> an onerous, time-consuming, and thankless task unless there is a reasonable
> chance of success, and the right rate for a job which requires both ability
> and experience.

Yes, but Open Source software may be supplied by companies. I should 
imagine that RedHat, SuSE/Novell etc. bid for contracts.
And I've worked on a good few tender submissions myself (read hours of 
effort and benchmarking on the latest whizzy processors).

Remember, it is free as in speech not as in beer.
I agree that some free beer is nice too (by that I mean that basing your 
   solution on freely downloadable code, say an Apache webserver, is a 
Good Thing TM, as someone else years later should be able to pick up 
support of the solution if necessary)



-- 
      John Hearns
      Senior HPC Engineer
      Streamline Computing,
      The Innovation Centre, Warwick Technology Park,
      Gallows Hill, Warwick CV34 6UW
      Office: 01926 623130 Mobile: 07841 231235
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug