Fwd: [SC.LUG] UK 'a closed shop for open source' - Public Sector - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com

[Peter Brooks]

Didn't hit reply all ;)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Peter Brooks <peter at theneb.co.uk>
Date: 19 Sep 2007 18:57
Subject: Re: [SC.LUG] UK 'a closed shop for open source' - Public
Sector - Breaking Business and Technology News at silicon.com
To: rs at m6-it.org


An interesting article and I'm just trying to keep a good balance with
any bias, however Microsoft's defence of 'it just works' seems like a
very weak argument. Has anyone any links to Microsoft's full speech or
is that it?

I, like many here are in huge favour of open source and articles such
as this one seem to back my view that a lot of the UK Public sector is
in some ways corrupted by such deals, however instead of starting a
religion debate I feel the way forward is to find ways round the
agreements and be able to demonstrate that OSS is indeed better for
the public sector.

For example in the education market a head of IT at a school in
Hampshire called Peter Savage updates his blog
(http://www.progbox.co.uk/wordpress) with his advances of introducing
OSS into his school, I find his blog always a  good read and it sounds
like he's got the attention of the head master and has made some
positive changes at the school.

However as with many other schools, the LEA have signed deals that
hardware may not be tampered with and ie Microsoft Windows cannot be
removed, however Mr Savage nicely got around it by using an external
hard drive.

Right I'm gonna stop writing now before this turns into a blog entry. :P

On 19/09/2007, Richard Smedley <rs at m6-it.org> wrote:
>
> http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39168438,00.htm
>
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