IBM do, and they also sell what they use too. Open Source it may be, but it is certainly not free and certainly not cheap.

Open Source is great, but you still need expertise. Any one can look at the source code, but just having it and being able to look at it does not mean that you will be able to fix it on your own.

I can open the bonnet of my car and look at the engine, but when it breaks I’m going to go to the mechanics – the government will be the same.

People here who tout OpenOffice have clearly never used the spreadsheet it comes with, which is more than 100x slower than Excel.

And Base is even worse, ugly, slow and crashes.

Also, ‘by 2015 public bodies will review existing solutions available before going to market for new solutions’ is quite appalling in that they don’t do this already, and it appears that accelerating this very unambitious date could bring significant savings.

Spend the money on actually making systems work for the benefit of the general public, instead of letting it go into the financial black hole of expensive proprietory software and the accompanying software management consultancies.
Why this doesn’t happen is a mystery to me – though as there is significant money involved I can make a guess.

(Schools should use and teach about open source software too.)

The COTS tag is used by suppliers to dishonestly drive up costs by delivering heavily customised software without the rights to the source required to allow modifications to fix bugs or add new features. So, once the initial contract is signed, the supplier has the government over a barrel – and the public gets shafted.

It’s well known that most of the money made in this type of contract is made from maintenance. This is where COTS = COSTS. Lack of source rights means that competition over service is not possible and competitors (big and small) are locked out of the market.

Open source has many potential benefits. One that is often overlooked is that it allows entrepreneurs and small businesses currently locked out by rules on supplier size to compete on merit for parts of a contract.

But the root cause is the failure of the Government to ensure that the public secures rights to access the source, to fix bugs and to add features to the information systems it buys. So, though moving completely to free and open source software (FOSS) would solve this problem, this isn’t not necessary.

Just ensure that the public has the rights it deserves for it’s vast expenditure. And if the current generation of suppliers want to walk away – let them go. New entrepreneurs untainted by failure will step up to replace them.

The second key is to provide a mechanism to allow public spirited advocates to speak on behalf of alternative innovative information system solutions during the procurement process. Increased use of FOSS should not just be about repeating the failures of the part at reduced cost. The purchasing process is dominated by those with vested interests in ensuring an expensive but inappropriate solution are chosen. High risk, expensive revolutionary approaches are chosen in the knowledge that the public will continue to pay until they work, without even considering whether low cost, low risk evolutionary approaches might deliver more at less cost.

It is particularly ironic that the public in the UK includes some of the world’s forecast computer scientists, world famous information architects and top coders but the state fears to ask their expert advice. The cost and impact of these systems are vast. The process needs to be more like a public inquiry and less like back room horse trading.

3/10 – John tries hard but finds some of the concepts difficult to understand.

http://paulcanning.blogspot.com/2009/09/lessons-from-great-2009-birmingham-city.html