Alex Hudson wrote:
thanks for the intersting pointer. I had already seen the site of FLOSSIE but not the one of affs.The Association For Free Software are already interested in this area: http://www.affs.org.uk/government/index.html AFFS would definitely be interested in both helping with your research, and the results of it. We recently hosted a conference (FLOSSIE), which was aimed (partially) at increasing the interest in free software on the desktop within education, which is another public sector.
One problem that currently hinders the take-up of free software in termsI was not aware of that. I agree that it can create more problems to the adoption of open source/free software.
of Governmental procurement is the natural tendency towards collective
negotiation on a national basis. Government is attempting to realise
discounts via bulk purchase of software, which often means that even
though free software is perfectly adequate in many areas, it could not
be purchased because there is already a local or national licence in
place for a proprietary equivalent. AFFS is currently looking at ways of
exposing that cost - you'll see on the Government pages above, for
example, we link to the record of the public accounts committee when
they looked into the cost of proprietary licences.
There are also
interesting statements in Hansard, where Paul Boateng MP said something
to the effect of, "it's impossible to say how much proprietary software
is costing us; we don't keep the records and it would be too expensive
to find out".
The question of whether or not free software is price or feature
competitive with proprietary software is not really an interesting
question any more; it is demonstrably feature competitive, and the price
of the software really depends on how you want to calculate it. For
example, you can make proprietary upgrades look quite cheap when you
factor in the cost of retraining when you move away from the package.
But, you can make free software look quite cheap when you take into
account that the current marketplace has no choice, there is no version
upgrade treadmill, and similar issues.
yes, I agree
I think that "open standards" are a hot area, where most claim that they are using open standards while in fact there is almost nothing open in their standard."Open standards" is quite a weak topic. It's very difficult to define what constitutes an open standard, for a start. Is published documentation good enough? No, not really - for any real-world interchange format, the documentation is not likely to be accurate enough to implement it. What about patents? Many formats are covered by patents - MPEG is a good example - so even if you have 100% accurate documentation, you still cannot implement the standard. Is encryption used, and who has the keys? If you cannot decrypt a document, you cannot read it, even if you know the structure inside. Etc., etc., etc. For me, the only real practical definition of an open standard is "there is some free software which talks this standard". But, most people will not recognise the huge numbers of problems that my definition attempts to address, and assume weaker definitions, such as "you can download a specification document", or (even worse) "the proprietor will allow you to licence the format under Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory (RAND) terms" which is usually complete b******t. Cheers,