[Scottish] The Future of the LUG

[Colin McKinnon]

On Thursday 11 December 2003 10:03, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 20:10, Ian Ruffell wrote:
> > Just for clarification: it's more a case of persuading folk like the
> > Scottish Executive and the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body to shift
> > off MS; not to mention encouraging similar moves in the public sector at
> > large.  Pat talks about this (with text of parliamentary questions, etc.)
> > on his website (www.patrickharviemsp.com).
>
> It's not so much getting politicians away from using Microsoft's
> products (although it could save a substantial amount) as getting them
> away from closed, secret, non-free document formats.  I can foresee
> problems ahead when all those documents written in Word 95 suddenly
> aren't readable when Office 2005 comes out and support for older formats
> is dropped (not that Microsoft would do such a thing, would they?)
>

Problem is, the UK govt seem to be keen on giving MASSIVE amounts of money to 
extrnal bodies to solve their problems (presumably the problems of *the 
external body*). The likes of Capita, IBM, Logica....etc.

Does someone *really* think "We're only going to be changing things this month 
- so why employ staff to fix our own problems when we can give someone else 
lots of money and blame them if it doesn't work." Is there some Machiavellian 
legislation preventing the civil service from providing an internal IT dept?

After IBM dropped the ball, it seems like UK plc is now making overtones to 
Sun (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/34440.html) about 'Open Source'. 
There's a company with a long history of involvement in Linux, that doesn't 
have it's own competing product range and agenda. Whoops! I suppose I 
shouldn't grumble - it might have been SCO!

C.