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I’ll just paste a copy of this email from Alan Cocks on the Ubuntu UK mailing list.
=========================================
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2008
From: alan c
To: British Ubuntu Talk
Subject: [ubuntu-uk] Desperately seeking Ubuntu Webbook - with Bolt Cutters!
In Bracknell, the Carphone Warehouse Webbook (Elonex) with preinstalled Ubuntu which is included in one of CPW’s deals is in such extraordinary demand that the recent display item in CPW Bracknell Princess Square shopping mall was stolen last week by desperate people using *bolt cutters*!
The many larger laptops with Vista installed were left untouched. Sad eh? Even thieves don’t want Vista.
The Webbook was secured using a kensington similar stranded wire lock, so I guess the culprits even had some angle grinding to do later, to remove the lock itself.
The desperate act took place in a normal shopping day in broad daylight, and the miscreants were seen making off at speed, unencumbered by antivirus or other unnecessary items which might have slowed them down!
Like most shopping malls, there is security video in operation, I trust that it will be put to good use.
=========================================
Apart from the obvious bit about stealing being wrong (Hmmm, makes me think about Number 10 Downing Street again) this is a great story… I love the bit about the thieves not wanting Vista - lol.
Thanks Alan.
August 26th, 2008
Categories: FLOSS in the news | Author: Alan Lord | Comments: 4 Comments |
I’m not quite sure I fully grasp what is going on with this (some would say I never do) but maybe it might be of interest to other readers and hopefully someone will come along and explain a bit more.
I was looking about on-line the other day just following my (rather large) nose around the ‘Anthony Baggett’s theme being used by Number 10 Downing Street’ story. And I came across something I don’t really understand. Perhaps others might be able to shed some light on what might be going on here?
Let’s start with the background: Number 10’s Website, is using a look and feel derived from an original theme by Anthony called NetWorker. The way we know this is by the header that was left in the main stylesheet and almost every other file from Anthony’s original package being left in tact on the server.
During my wanderings around the internet I came upon this page: https://secure.mysociety.org/cvstrac/chngview?cn=12360 which shows a list of files that have been updated or changed in some way on a developer’s version control system called CVS. The owner of this system is a group called MySociety.org.

According to their website, MySociety are a non-profit charity and who look to have built some pretty interesting sites; many around freedom of information and enabling better access to Government. They were responsible for creating the Petitions System for Number 10 which looks to have been written as a custom application using at least Perl and PHP.
Here is a screenshot of the page showing the date of the commit (04/08/2008) and the name of the committer (matthew) and a quite long list of files that have been added, removed or altered as part of this commit.
For those who are not familiar, this kind of tool is used by developers to manage software projects. You can literally see each change made to your project, by time and by developer so when something gets fixed (or gets subsequently broken again) you can go back in time and recover your project to the same state prior to a particular commit.
I would like to draw your attention toward the bottom of the page in the screenshot. There you can see a few stylesheet files being removed and two new ones being added. One line in particular caught my attention:
“mysociety/pet/web/no10_css/style.css added-> 1.1“
If you click on the revision number (1.1 in this case) to view the contents of the file1 you will see that the it has the same header as that of the main Number 10 Downing Street file.
I used the Meld comparison tool as I did before to compare it with Anthony’s original2, and this is another derivative work of Anthony’s original style.css file. And I compared this one with the stylesheet used for the main Number 10 website3 they are very, very similar indeed.
If you visit the Prime Minister’s petition site note the similar look and feel to the main 10 Downing Street pages. Now take a look at the stylesheet for this site: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/no10_css/style.css.
This looks to me like two separate websites, developed by two different companies, but both using the same derived work. Anyone care to elucidate?
1. My Society’s stylesheet
2. Anthony’s original stylesheet
3. No. 10’s heavily modified stylesheet
August 25th, 2008
Categories: FLOSS in the news | Author: Alan Lord | Comments: No Comments |
A bit of light relief… I came across a link to this very funny page on the Linux From Scratch mailing list.
I also really enjoyed the sig of the poster: Jeremy Henty…
“I compiled Linux From Scratch, and all I got was this lousy command line.”
Nice one.
Thanks Jeremy.
August 23rd, 2008
Categories: FLOSS in the news | Author: Alan Lord | Comments: No Comments |
Here is the output of a Linux command called tree on the original contents of the theme that NMM claim to only have used the stylesheet from1.
~/Desktop/dev_area/networker-10$ tree -phDC
.
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 24K Jun 21 2007] How To Post Images In This Theme.doc
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.0K Jul 11 2007] archive.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 397 Aug 17 2007] archives.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 4.0K Jul 8 2007] comments.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 147 Jul 11 2007] footer.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 80 Jun 5 2007] functions.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.7K Jul 12 2007] header.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 267 Jul 12 2007] ie6.css
|-- [drwxr-xr-x 232 Aug 17 2007] images
| |-- [-rw-r--r-- 88K Jul 12 2007] Thumbs.db
| |-- [-rw-r--r-- 2.0K Jul 12 2007] ad_space.gif
| |-- [-rw-r--r-- 217 Jun 18 2007] bullet.gif
| |-- [-rw-r--r-- 398 Jun 22 2007] nav_hover.gif
| |-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.3K Jun 6 2007] sub_rss.gif
| `-- [-rw-r--r-- 4.3K Jul 12 2007] wp.gif
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.1K Jul 9 2007] index.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 18K Jun 13 2007] license.rtf
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 700 Jul 11 2007] page.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 60K Jun 13 2007] screenshot.png
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 946 May 10 2007] search.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 257 May 10 2007] searchform.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 2.5K Jul 12 2007] sidebar.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 1.3K Jul 11 2007] single.php
|-- [-rw-r--r-- 2.4K Feb 2 2007] sitemap.php
`-- [-rw-r--r-- 9.6K Jul 12 2007] style.css
I thought I would try to find out just how much of Anthony’s theme is still there. Not being much of a hacker myself, all I have done is simply added each of the file names above to a URL that points to the location of the theme directory in the Firefox navigation bar. So the whole URL in the bar looks like this: http://www.number10.gov.uk/wp-content/themes/networker-10/filename-to-look-for.
If you try and open a non-existent file, you get a “404″ not found message as one would expect. Anything else means the file is present. The way php works however makes it very hard to tell what the contents of the .php files are.
Guess what? There is an awful lot of Anthony’s content still on Number 10’s website. Here’s what I found when comparing the response I got from Number 10 to the original files in the theme package:
How To Post Images In This Theme.doc:
Files are identical and there is a really interesting comment at the bottom of this file that is just so ironic: “to give credit where credit is due, I borrowed this idea from Chris Pearson who is the author of the Cutline theme.“
archive.php:
File exists and returns a blank page.
archives.php:
File isn’t present, returns 404.
comments.php:
File present and returns exactly the same response text as is written in the original file: “Please do not load this page directly. Thanks!”
footer.php:
File present and returns a blank page.
functions.php:
File present and returns a blank page.
header.php:
File present, returns a blank page.
ie6.css:
File present, has been modified greatly and Anthony’s header has been removed! But it does contain an identical first line of css styling: #content, #sidebar { overflow: hidden; }. Note the spacing and line breaks etc
- /images
Thumbs.db:
Files are identical.
ad_space.gif:
Files are identical.
bullet.gif:
Files are identical.
nav_hover.gif:
Files are identical.
sub_rss.gif:
Files are identical.
wp.gif:
Files are identical.
index.php:
File present, and returns a blank page.
license.rtf:
File is present and the files are identical. Yet, the copyright notice of the site states “Crown Copyright! so which applies here?
page.php:
File present and returns a blank page.
screenshot.png:
This one is really funny… files are identical.
search.php:
Not present, returns 404.
searchform.php:
Not present, returns 404.
sidebar.php:
File present and returns “Newsletter. Sign up to our newsletter to keep updated with the latest information from Number 10, Click here to subscribe”. The HTML source retains comments from the original.
single.php:
File present and returns blank page.
sitemap.php:
File present and returns XHTML header information the same as in the original.
style.css:
File present, as we know already.
So, out of 24 files in the original theme package, only three files have been removed. If you look here in the comments from my post of yesterday, you can read what Dave Smith of NMM said:
1. The only file that was drawn upon from Ant’s theme was the css file.
Now clearly some of the files above will be pre-requisites for any Wordpress theme (like index.php for example) but 21 out of 24?.
I’m sure I can smell something quite smelly around here.
August 22nd, 2008
Categories: FLOSS in the news | Author: Alan Lord | Comments: 25 Comments |
This is a post largely related to the response that David Smith of New Media Maze posted yesterday regarding the farce of their web site development for Number 10 Downing Street.
The story so far, for any new readers, can be found here, here and here. And do follow the links in those posts to the various other sources to get a broader picture.
(David, if I am wrong anywhere, I assume you will let me know…)
What concerns me greatly about this whole fiasco is that New Media Maze are still (as I write this at least) basically trying to act as though they’ve done nothing really wrong and everything is fine. I think it isn’t.
David’s post seems to be an attempt to convince the reader that because they changed lots of things from the original template, their requirement to appropriately attribute the original work is negligible and the lines they forgot to remove left in the stylesheet are sufficient.
His post also, to me at least, indicates a rather poor appreciation of what Open Source, “The Commons” and the new collaborative world in which we all live really mean.
First then, the Wordpress theme.
The simple fact is this: the Number 10 website which New Media Maze claim to have designed is based on original work by somebody else. How much of the original work remains in the design is really not important, although almost all of the original stylesheet is still present within the gargantuan ~4000 lines of the new site’s file. (Incidentally, who on earth designed a stylesheet like that? I don’t recall ever seeing a 65kb stylesheet before. Maintenance and alterations are going to be fun…). And we also saw that the index.php file was from the original source as they had left the comment in it.
Irrespective of the legal position New Media Maze believe themselves to be in, the right (as in decent, proper, common) practice in these circumstances is to attribute the work in a suitable manner. Such as a simple line somewhere on the site saying something like: “This website is based on an original idea by…”.
I’m sure you all get the idea. And being a “Full Service New Media Agency” I’m sure NMM could come up with something suitably profound.
Most people on the Internet have no idea what a CSS is, how to find or read one, and why should they to be frank? There was a visible copyright notice in the original theme. It has been removed.
The continuation of this farce, by NMM is not helping their position, or their client’s, one little bit. To be honest, by continuing to bleat on about how little of the original work was used rather than just doing the right thing, makes them look like [insert your prefered derogatory phrase here]. My personal choice would be “a bunch of cowboys”.
On a secondary, but related note, an impression I get from reading David’s statement makes me wonder if Downing Street are actually running Wordpress or are in fact running some uberpress code that has been made ultra-secure and “top secret”. If I am wrong about this please let me know, it is just an assumption on my behalf. What version of WP are they running? We can’t tell as they took out the meta-tag.
If they have hacked the code to make it more secure, I hope that those modifications have been provided back to the Wordpress community so everyone gets the benefit. If they haven’t, Downing Street are not running Wordpress, but a fork. They are now stuck with a version which will get harder and harder to maintain, and will ultimately be less secure than the publicly developed OSS code that has the world’s eyes watching and improving it every day…. I hope I am wrong and the backend is a regular Wordpress release but if it isn’t, then Downing Street really have been sold a pup and are not using Open Source code at all.
August 21st, 2008
Categories: FLOSS in the news | Author: Alan Lord | Comments: 7 Comments |
This is quite amazing stuff really. You just couldn’t make up a better story.
The Number 10 website fiasco just keeps going.
New Media Maze, that “Full Service New Media Agency”, look to have really screwed up. Not only have they nicked a free Wordpress template and removed the attribution and removed the license, but it seems the site itself is actually full of bugs and errors too.
Dizzy Thinks has found some lovely errors and a strange chap called “Adam Test”… ROTFL.
And when you’ve finished rolling around on the floor laughing take a look at this research on The Rouseabout to see what a little more digging throws up: (I’ll give you a clue: 404s).
Honestly, if this is what we get for £100,000 of taxpayer’s money from New Media Maze then, quite frankly, I’m glad I hadn’t heard of them before.
How much are the Gov. going to spend on our ID card database? The one that nobody wants. Do you trust them to get it right? Nahhh.
And Glyn Moody discovered a little known government project to build a “massive central silo for all UK communications data…”.
It’s at times like these that I fall on my virtual knees and bless the cyber-gods that ensure every single major UK government project is a complete and utter failure, so this doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ever working properly. Phew.
PLEASE!!!! Someone take these huge IT projects out of the Government’s hands! They are so crap at it our whole lives will end up on Facebook if we aren’t careful… Oh, most already are.
All we need now is for Microshaft to come rolling along spouting off about how much better the site would have been if they’d spent the money on Blog Server 2008 running on Windoors 2010 with Sequal Server 2012… or whatever crap it is they are pushing this week.
August 20th, 2008
Categories: FLOSS in the news | Author: Alan Lord | Comments: 1 Comment |
Being “that-kind-of-a-bloke”, I thought I’d dig a bit further into the Number 10 Steals Free Wordpress Theme story
Here’s the background:
- No. 10 Are running Wordpress1
- The theme (or template) is based on one called NetWorker2
- The attribution and copyright notice that is in the original footer has been removed
- The site claims to be Crown Copyright and makes no reference to the CC-by-sa license used in the original template
I am a bit confused here. Why would a web design shop (or “Full Service New Media Agency” as they call themselves), who were apparently paid the best part of £100k for this job3, use somebody else’s template as the basis for their design?
- You might think it would be because using a pre-made template would save you loads of tricky coding and playing around with CSS trying to get your site to look the same in IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari and Opera [A task I am quite familiar with myself].
- You might also think that using a pre-made template would allow you to make minor modifications, add some different images and give you something that looks really different.
- Of course it might be simply that you don’t have time to create a new theme from scratch and using an “off-the-shelf” template will mean you can get the site up and running much faster.
- Or another possibility could be that you like ripping off your customers for as much as possible and using a free (or even a bought) template will mean your costs are minimal.
All, some, or none of the above could be reasons to use an existing template as a basis for your new design.
So how much new coding would be needed making the changes to an existing template to suit your new design? 10%, 20%, maybe even 50% and it would still be worth while…
Get this: the revised stylesheet from Anthony Baggett’s template is more than 6 times the original’s length and size! And that isn’t all made up of whitespace either…
The original stylesheet4 is 612 lines in length and is 9234 bytes in size (9KB).
The modified stylesheet5 is 3826 lines long and weighs in at a frankly astonishing 63724 bytes (63KB)!
You can obviously download the two stylesheets from their websites directly (I recommend using a plugin for Firefox called Web Developer) or to make things easier, I have made them available at the bottom of this page.
Looking through the new file, the amount of duplication and repetition of styling of the same, or very similar elements, is quite odd. It certainly isn’t the way I would construct a theme. Why duplicate the same styling over, and over, and over again when you could craft the logic so that each of these elements have a commonality that could then be controlled with a much smaller stylesheet?
Here are a few screenshots showing some of the differences between the two files. In the brilliant Open Source comparison application Meld I’m using here, the original stylesheet is shown in the left pane and the modified one is on the right. The first image shows the very top of both files with Anthony’s header still in tact. The second and third are just a couple of fairly random points where the new file contains a great deal of repetition as I am walking down through the files. The final image shows the bottom of both files (note the line numbers!).
   
One thing that is clear from using a tool like Meld is that these two files are definitely related. The way the application displays the differences, it is clear where the files are the same and where they differ. The larger file is certainly a derivative work of Anthony’s original.
Another aspect I found rather funny in this investigation was the method of version control for this huge stylesheet. Both stylesheets have the same version number and there doesn’t appear to have been any tool used to update the header as would be usual. How on earth does a business that develops a ~4000 line stylesheet manage to do that without using some sort of versioning system?
I have helped businesses use and modify pre-made templates for Joomla!, and to be honest if you are making changes of any significance to these templates, it is almost always easier and quicker and cheaper to start from scratch. For small mods and changes pre-bought templates can be really good value (I mean $50 is fairly average), but getting your head around someone else’s code is never easy and takes considerable time. For major alterations it just doesn’t make financial sense.
Now, making additions and changes just to the stylesheet of more than 6 times the original is not good business sense in my opinion. How much more work have they done to the PHP code that we can’t see? We know they have modified at least index.php (by removing the Wordpress statistic generator meta tag) and footer.php (by removing Anthony’s copyright notice). But if they have made SO MANY changes and additions to the stylesheet, there surely must be a good deal of altered php code, or additions, in the core php files too? Surely, it would have been easier to make a new template from scratch in this instance?
This leads on to the other question that might be worth digging into a bit more; GPL violations:
“If” the developers have modified the Wordpress engine, as is being suggested as a possibility here, and then sold it to the Government, in my humble understanding that means they have distributed their modifications. That means those modifications must also be licensed under the GPL. I had a quick look on New Media Maze’s web site and couldn’t find an area for software downloads or mention of the GPL. That doesn’t say anything to be honest and there might be nothing to this, but it would be interesting to find out a bit more… Is there a real Wordpress guru who can look at the “footprint” of the XHTML the site generates and tell if it is different? Or are there any other ways to tell if it has been modified?
Anyway, what a wheez this all is for us bloggers: It just isn’t Gordon’s year is it…
1. www.number10.gov.uk/
2. NetWorker Theme
3. £100k for Wordpress site
4. Anthony’s original stylesheet
5. No. 10’s heavily modified stylesheet
August 18th, 2008
Categories: FLOSS in the news | Author: Alan Lord | Comments: 10 Comments |

Number 10’s new website, from our beloved government who are such strong users and supporters of Open Source Software [NOT], is running on Wordpress. This isn’t actually big news now. There’s plenty of comment about that on the web via Google.
Well, that’s OK I guess. At last they are starting to grok OSS perhaps, although I’m rather inclined to actually surmise that they [#10] don’t even know what Wordpress is. They just bought a website…
Anyway, quite a nice site layout don’t you think? I wonder who designed their site?
Looking at the html source, we see that the stylesheets are in a directory called networker-10/ and many of the images are in a subdirectory called images/.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<!-- leave this for stats please -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/wp-content/themes/networker-10/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/wp-content/themes/networker-10/ie6.css" media="screen" />
<![endif]-->
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="/feed" />
Firstly, see the bit above where it says <!-- leave this for stats please -->? Usually, in there, that line reads: <meta name="generator" content="WordPress X.X.X" /> where the X.X.X is the version of Wordpress the site is running.
So they’ve removed changed that then. I wonder if they are trying to conceal the fact they are using WP? Not a very useful trick though is it? Having a directory tree called /wp-content/themes/... is a bit of a giveaway if you ask me.
Now then, if you visit Antbag.com and look at some of the themes they have created, there’s one on there called “Networker”. Here’s the demo page http://antbag.com/demo/index.php?wptheme=NetWorker
Let’s look at the top few lines of the html source for this theme:
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.2" />
<!-- leave this for stats please -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://antbag.com/demo/wp-content/themes/networker-10/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://antbag.com/demo/wp-content/themes/networker-10/ie6.css" media="screen" />
<![endif]-->
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://antbag.com/demo/?feed=rss2" />
They look quite similar don’t they? The directory structure is identical and the top-level theme directory is called networker-10. Amazing…
The Networker theme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Which you can read all about here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
I can only assume that Number 10 have requested, and received, permission of the author to remove all traces of this license and attribution from their Wordpress site. I have left a “contact us message” at the author’s website to see if this is the case…
[Update] Anthony Baggett, the theme’s author, has just confirmed that No 10 have not requested that the attribution be removed. That’s not playing fair by my book.
[Update 2] Seems like I am not the only one to have noticed this. A bit more digging has thrown up the following sites also commenting on #10’s cock-up. One is also suggesting it cost £100k. Not bad for a ripped off theme running on an Open Source blogging engine… Links below]
http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/prime-ministers-website-breaks-copyright-law/
http://community.livejournal.com/theyorkshergob/123043.html
http://www.mikerouse.net/2008/08/15/10-downing-street-wordpress-website-knock-off-and-rip-off/
http://dizzythinks.net/2008/08/downing-street-claims-crown-copyright.html
August 18th, 2008
Categories: FLOSS in the news | Author: Alan Lord | Comments: 18 Comments |
So, as everyone thought would happen, the naive and sycophantic ISO and IEC bodies have decided to ignore the appeals, the scandalous bribery and corruption of their hitherto decent standing and approve ISO/IEC DIS 29500 (OOXML to you and me).
The two ISO and IEC technical boards have given the go-ahead to publish ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology – Office Open XML formats, as an ISO/IEC International Standard after appeals by four national standards bodies against the approval of the document failed to garner sufficient support.
And toward the end of the rather short press release they come up with this real gem:
The adoption process of Office Open XML (OOXML) as an ISO/IEC Standard has generated significant debate related to both technical and procedural issues which have been addressed according to ISO and IEC procedures.
Understating the blindingly obvious or what? And just what has been addressed exactly? Nothing it seems to me. They have just bent over and let M$ shove their specification where the sun don’t shine.
But, as we near the end of this farce and fiasco, I think there are a couple of ironies which mark the approval of OOXML, and the process surrounding, ultimately as being little more that a damp squib.
- The decision by Microshaft themselves to not bother with OOXML in their next Office release and to, even more amazingly, deliver native support for ODF.
- The fiasco has shown that ISO/IEC is basically now an irrelevance when it comes to defining useful standards within the sphere of IT. They are too slow, too ponderous and too “up-their-own-arses” to be able to recognise when they have been shafted.
We have plenty of excellent standardisation bodies which have fundamentally driven the creation of the Internet and they have all used community-based, open processes. IETF, W3C and so on.
All I remember the ISO ever giving me in IT was the notorious OSI 7 Layer Model way back in the 80s. And what happened to it? It died almost before it was born because an open, easy to implement and flexible protocol stack called TCP/IP came along…
Bye Bye ISO.
August 15th, 2008
Categories: FLOSS in the news | Author: Alan Lord | Comments: 4 Comments |
I know I’m kind of preaching to the converted here but I have been thinking about ideas to promote OSS, and our company’s services, here in the UK. And I’m particularly thinking about this with regards to our current economic climate, i.e. very dodgy.
For most of the readership of this blog it will come as no surprise that Open Source is a bloody great way to avoid spending money on software. That’s a very simple argument and one that has merit. But clearly capital cost isn’t the only answer and replacing existing infrastructure with something new, even if it is free, can be costly in other ways.
So are there other benefits and factors where Open Source Software solutions can be of distinct benefit in these rather troubled times?
Well I think there are, and I’ve dumped some of my rather random thoughts down here. I’d love to hear your opinion on them and get any other suggestions you may have too:
- To me, a major benefit of OSS to a business is when they are looking to deploy a new solution or service. Be it a CRM, or ERP, or perhaps their business model has changed and they need to actually do something fundamentally different to survive. Deploying OSS in this scenario is almost a no-brainer. You will have to pay to integrate this new service to some degree whatever solution you select; so why not use a free one and one that gives you an ability to adapt and change features in a far simpler way than with a proprietary system?
- But now, cash is really tight. It is even more important that your business gets every penny it can from any investment it makes. So there may be an even simpler argument: If you can’t afford to invest in a proprietary software solution but you can get similar functionality from a free OSS solution, can you really afford NOT to go down the OSS route? Your competitors probably will.
- Is OSS now the ONLY choice for the cash-strapped business? You can’t stand still. You have to do something to generate more leads/revenue/cash flow or improve operating efficiency etc. Standing still in our current climate is equivalent to going backwards in a growth economy.
- Vista bashing? Many firms will probably be getting close to needing an upgrade cycle on their desktops. Do they go Vista? There are a whole world of reason why not too, including performance, reliability, security and the need to upgrade hardware. Is OSS ready for the Desktop. Personally I think so; but does Joe Blogs? Can they be convinced? We are certainly hearing more positive noises in this direction but is it a step-too-far? The costs of replacing your desktop licenses is going to be pretty steep.
- How about bringing certain tasks back in-house? Many businesses will outsource to external companies specific jobs or functions that they use on a regular basis. By deploying OSS in-house, could they do some of this work themselves and save money, speed up the process, become more efficient? I’m thinking of these sort of things: basic graphics work, PDF creation, page layout, web design/maintenance. There’s no cost to download and install The Gimp,
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