[Gllug] Dealing with "Word-Only" organisations

[John Hearns]

On 8 November 2010 10:51, Philip Hands <phil at hands.com> wrote:
>>
>
>> (I've been saying the same thing for years. But the Govt would rather
>> emply retired rear-admirals)
>
> OK, so how do we fix this ongoing cock-up?
>
I could shoot some software engineers? Please?


I remember meeting Richard Grainger (the retired admiral) in the early
days of the NHS IT project.

As I remember, there was a parliamentary lobby group which was
interested in free software and
the potential of the internet - I recall going over to Parliament to
meeth them (I was working in
St Thomas). They seemed quite clued in, and quite receptive. For the
life of me I forget who they were.

My only contribution here is to say we should continually point out,
at every juncture, that the biggest
success in distrubuted systems, the World Wide Web, is an open
standard for the exchange of data,
as you say. It says nothing about how you store the data.
At the tiem of the WWW, there were plenty of commercial systems which
physicists used to communicate -
PROFS on IBM mainframes, VAX Notes (which I used very enthusiastically).
The Web was a success because no company owned the standard, and you
could look at the source for
any page - so you could then copy what was being doen and produce your
own web page.
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