Uk Government “wakes up” to Open Source!
Blimey… Here’s a snippet of news out today that I almost missed!
Parliamentarians to discuss Open Source software
The economic impact of Open Source software will be discussed with parliamentarians and senior government officials on Wednesday 12th September at the Westminster eForum, held at the Palace of Westminster. Open Source community leaders Alan Cox, developer of the Linux Kernel, and Mark Taylor, President of the Open Source Consortium, will contrast the popularity of Open Source technologies in industry and with its limited adoption in the public sector.
The article goes on to mention that there will be a Microsoft employee present to support the cause of proprietary software. So that would be:
- It costs LOADS,
- You get “locked-in” to one vendor
- We own your data, not you,
- We get to sell you more licenses and support contracts than you’ll ever really need or use…
It would be great to be fly on the wall… I’d love to hear what Alan Cox and Mark Taylor could suggest instead of spending approx. £10b on NHS IT systems that never work, or deliver what was expected.
I’d really love to know why it costs SO much to build a big database and a front end? eBay did it with Java, Google did it with MySQL and Linux, it can’t be THAT fucking hard now can it?
About Westminster eForum
The Westminster eForum aims to provide the premier environment where parliamentarians, senior policy advisors, regulators and other decision makers can discuss critical issues, and exchange ideas and information with leaders from industry, responsible interest groups, analysts, academics, journalists and others.
For more information visit the Westminster eForum website.
Sounds like a “Real Gas” that does – – – – Not.
I had a quick look at the website and found the item listed and a link to a page where you can book tickets! Ooooh I thought – that would be fun. However, I think Microsoft must be sponsoring it:
Tickets are £190 plus VAT (£223.25) and include:
- One delegate place including delegate materials and refreshments; and
- One PDF copy of the briefing document (including transcripts of the speeches, comments and questions, as well as extra articles submitted by delegates, which is distributed to all attendees approximately seven days after the seminar).
If it was even mildly affordable, I’d have booked it but 200 quid is ridiculous, for a couple of cups of coffee and a pdf of the transcript. Maybe the Government haven’t quite got the idea of Open Source yet.
If anyone knows anyone who does go, or a journalist or someone (Glyn Moody?) gets a concession, please give us a report after the event. I’d love to know how it went and what was discussed.
Update: Just had an confirmation from Glyn – he is on one of the panels so I’m sure there’ll be a good summary of the proceedings on his blog shortly afterwards.
Dell and Ubuntu arrive in Europe!
It’s official. Dell have just announced that are now supplying Ubuntu Linux on products into the UK, France and Germany!
Here’s the story as issued on Dell’s Linux blog. And here’s the announcement on Ubuntu’s site with links to Dell’s store pages in France, Germany and the UK. This isn’t a marketing pre-announcement either; according to Ubuntu’s site you can order the PCs from tomorrow (8th August 2007).
Fantastic news. Now, where did I put my credit card…
Open Source lagging behind in the UK
The UK’s adoption of Open Source technology is lagging the US and the rest of Europe, according to a new survey published today by one of the leading new generation Open Source companies Alfresco.
The report called the Open Source Barometer should be an absolutely fasciniating tool as Alfresco plan to issue it every six months. This should give a great insight into trends which are otherwise hard to identify.
The survey was carried out between April and June this year (2007) and the information was garnered from approximately 10,000 new members joining the Alfresco community.
Among the highlights revealed by the Open Source Barometer Report are:
- Operating systems: Surprisingly, users evaluated Alfresco as much on Windows as they did on different flavors of Linux, but they strongly preferred to deploy production systems on Linux. Windows plays an increasingly important role in testing and evaluation because it is the operating system on most desktops.
- Application servers: Users strongly preferred open source Tomcat or JBoss over the leading proprietary offerings from Sun, IBM and BEA, even in production environments.
- Databases: Overwhelmingly, users test and deploy on MySQL with PostgreSQL a surprisingly close second for both evaluations and production deployment. Oracle was the most popular proprietary choice among the proprietary databases.
- Browsers and portals: To access the Alfresco ECM repository, users preferred browsers over portals. And Firefox was the most popular choice among different browsers. When users selected a portal preference, 80 percent chose Liferay or JBoss Portal.
Also, another very interesting result from this survey seems to suggest that Novell’s alliance with Microsoft has done them no favours whatsoever… In fact whilst use of Red Hat Linux has more than doubled, Novell’s Suse Linux has remained flat.
For me one of the key findings is that while the report shows Windows is a popular evaluation platform for open-source software, most enterprises use Linux when they go into production. That says it all really 😉
A fascinating and excellent report from a very high quality company.
