Re: [sheflug] government open source policy

[David Willington <david.willington [at] xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 11:19 +0000, Alex Hudson wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 11:02 +0000, David Willington wrote:
> > I'm not having any specific problems apart from the general one of the
> > school not having heard of open source. I've convinced the IT department 
> > and head of IT that it's going to provide a good solution, certainly 
> > better and cheaper than what they've got at the moment so things are 
> > going well there. 
> 
> Oh, good news. To be honest, the "open source doesn't sell it to them"
> doesn't really surprise me: it doesn't really tell them much about how
> the product is going to fit their needs. This is one of the reasons I
> don't like the term, "open source" is never going to be a winning
> marketing argument because mostly people aren't going to care up front
> (though in close comparison later, you would hope it would be valuable
> to them - just initially, they're going to care more about whether or
> not the product has the features they need).
I realised this a while ago. The main thing seems to be that they don't
ever consider it an option.


> > Does the eGIF mean that public bodies shouldn't send me word documents?
> 
> Not really. 
> 
> >From the e-Gif FAQ:
>         
>         Q. What does e-GIF support for .doc, .xls, .ppt and .pps file
>         type mean?
>         
>         It means that these file types may be used as e-service access
>         standards when using computer workstations. Such file types can
>         be imported and exported into applications running on MAC and
>         Linux workstation. The e-GIF does not favour any particular
>         operating system or application product.
>         
>         Q. Is the use of Open Office and their Files types’ compatible
>         with the e-GIF?
>         
>         Yes, definitely they are freely available as downloads. Open
>         Office is also compliant to the governments open source policy.
>         The native Open Office File types can be used when exchanging
>         files for Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Picture, and
>         Presentation between consenting parties. Otherwise, when
>         exchanging files or when providing downloadable documents the
>         files should be exported/imported using one of the file types
>         defined in Table 6: Specifications for Computer Workstations of
>         the Technical Standards Catalogue.
> 
> Now, tell me those aren't two of the most confused and irrelevant
> answers you've ever read ;) 
> 
> The first answer - "e-Gif does not favour any .. application", but the
> Office-only binary file formats are OK. Hmmm. Second answer - "Open
> Office"(sic) is compatible because it's a free download, but you must
> export in Microsoft format.
> 
> So yeah, actually, e-Gif mandates binary Office formats. 
> 
> Given that e-Gif likes XML, requires Dublin Core metadata (which is
> OpenDocument format), wants XML forms (again, in OpenDocument - XForms),
> etc. you'd think that OpenDocument would be a fit.
> 
> .doc is the ugly wart on the Govt. e-Gif policy. Actually, I should
> write an article about this for AFFS' website, because I think a lot of
> people don't realise what a chronic policy this actually is.
Thanks for all this. I'll have to mull it all over later. The scheme
I've proposed to the school is to get round the problem of intermittent
internet access from the school while still providing 24/7 access to the
VLE. We'll run moodle internally and externally and synch the two
servers every so often. Pupils accessing from the internet will resolve
to the external server and those in school will access the local server.
If the internet connection goes down (it was out of action for a week
last term) it'll be an inconvenience but won't make the VLE unavailable,
and there shouldn't be bottleneck problems with the internet access. I
saw about 8 VLEs at BETT this year and they're all hosted on the
companies' servers and require internet access. Plus this scheme looks
like it'll be cheaper. The school seems tied (politically) to the
internet access that the LEA provides. I've suggested we try and sneak
another independant line into the school for synching the servers.

> 
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> 
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