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

Christopher Hunter chrisehunter at blueyonder.co.uk
Sun Oct 15 01:33:31 UTC 2006


On Sunday 15 Oct 2006 00:15, Jack Bertram wrote:

> Without wishing to get into an argument (I have no facts, beyond
> some knowledge of government tendering processes), it's just not
> possible to assert that "no government contracts are untainted".  While
> you've qualified it this time by saying you couldn't find any, rather
> than that there were none, how many have you investigated?  What
> proportion does that make of all contracts?  If you've got good
> evidence, why haven't you presented it to a court of law?
>
> Perhaps I'm naive.

I'm not getting into an argument, but the research by myself (and others) was 
extremely extensive.  In every instance examined, there were inducements, 
surreptitious "side deals" and other nefarious methods.  

Sadly, we appear to live in a fundamentally corrupt society.  The difference 
between the UK and Italy or Nigeria is that we hide our corruption beneath a 
veneer of respectability and spurious "British" civility.

FOSS is probably a dead duck when it comes to government, education and most 
major companies.  

Government isn't interested because nobody want to stop the money machine that 
is provided by proprietary software and operating systems. 

Most education can't be interested because IT purchasing is government 
controlled, and anything other than MS is seen as "non industry standard".  
Higher education is a different, luckily.  The huge reductions in government 
expenditure on the Universities mean that they must take advantage of any 
means possible to cut costs.

Most large companies and corporations aren't interested in FOSS software - the 
majority of people with their hands on the purse strings don't believe that 
it can work for them.  The "if it's free it can't be any good" argument wins 
every time.  There's also a serious lack of people able to maintain 
FOSS-based business systems - though more are training these days - and MCSEs 
are cheap and plentiful.

The only place that there can be a significant take up of FOSS is on personal 
and home computers.  As MS price their new "operating system" higher than the 
price of a basic set of hardware, people will look elsewhere for their 
software.  I've lost count of the installs I've done for friends and family, 
and none of them have returned to MS.  

With a concerted effort, we can spread FOSS to the home user.  When it comes 
to government, education or most business, we've a LONG way to go!

Chris

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