The U.K. government claims that it may save 75 million pounds ($119 million) over the next five years by harnessing itself firmly to Microsoft. That may be true, but the cost savings come from what the U.K. would have paid Microsoft, and they don't take into account what it could have saved by shopping around.
More ironic, however, than such ironic "cost savings" is its nomenclature: Angela Eagle, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, suggests the Microsoft purchase "reinforces the Government's commitment to its Open Source Action Plan." Huh??? Buying lots of non-open-source Microsoft software is a commitment to...open source?
I think Eagle needs a primer on what open source means, and what it costs.
Perhaps Gartner could help. Gartner is now saying that e-commerce teams within IT departments can shave 35 percent off their costs by using open source. Forrester, for its part, surveyed a wide range of corporations and found that 87 percent had achieved cost savings through open source.
Some public sector organizations get it. The United Nations, for example, is rolling out a new program to bring tuition-free higher education to the world using open source and open course materials. And the U.S. Department of Defense continues to increase its adoption of open source to boost productivity while simultaneously cutting costs.
Microsoft is, of course, getting more active in open source, and is also trying to learn to integrate open-source principles (like hassle-free evaluations), but having some seriously mixed results.
However, buying more Office licenses won't net the U.K. any open-source cost savings, from Microsoft or anyone else. It's very likely the U.K. could significantly improve upon its savings with Microsoft simply by using open source. I'd be willing to wager that the U.K. could save at least five times that amount...in the first year.
Will Eagle give me the chance to prove it? Not likely, mate.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
President Barack Obama recently made waves by tapping Sun Microsystems' chairman to pen a white paper on the benefits of open source.
Not to be outdone, Britain's Tory (conservative) party is now suggesting that it will, if elected, shift to open source to save an immediate 600 million British pounds (about $858 million).
While I support any organization's greater adoption of open source, the Tories seem to be treating open source like a campaign slogan, rather than a thoughtful IT-purchasing policy. (As a conservative, it pains me to have to write that. :-))
Yes, open source can save organizations a great deal of money and provide greater IT flexibility, as Nestle recently discovered with its own open-source adoption. But open source is not an immediate panacea, and promoting it as such will only end up blackening the eye of open source, if the cost savings aren't immediately delivered.
There was a time when it was enough to market open source without backing up the slogans. That time has passed. Open source delivers real business value. It can stand on its own merits without politicians promising the moon.
Who says the United Kingdom doesn't grok open source? Well, I do, for one, but the UK's National Health Service, which has notoriously bought big with Microsoft in the past (resulting in a Microsoft-specific page for NHS employees), is looking beyond Redmond to open-source Pentaho for its business intelligence needs, according to this IT-Finance Connection podcast.
This is important news for all open-source vendors, as it introduces a crack in the Microsoft dam within the NHS and, ultimately, the entire UK government sector.
Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell the NHS and Microsoft, since they're promoting a series of Microsoft BI-focused training events.
So, Microsoft and proprietary software isn't losing its place within the NHS and UK government anytime soon, but Pentaho's beachhead is good news for it, as well as everyone else in the open-source business community that wants to do business in the UK. It's about time.
The UK's primary school education program has remained roughly the same since it was instituted in 1904. That's all about to change.
As reported in The Times, the UK will soon introduce a series of sweeping changes to the nation's primary school education, "aimed at producing a curriculum for the 21st Century" which will see information technology classes given equal standing with English and Math.
Proponents of the new system argue that it's not a matter of discarding the core subjects of English, Math, Science, etc., but rather of teaching them in new ways in order to make them more easily digestible by students.
The material is proposed to be taught around six learning areas: understanding English, communication, and languages; mathematical understanding; scientific and technological understanding; human, social, and environmental understanding; understanding physical health and well-being; and understanding arts and design.
Sir Jim [Rose, author of the report,] said that combining traditional subjects in themed "learning areas" and introducing more practical and applied teaching would help pupils to make use of their knowledge in real-life situations, such as in managing their own finances.
The idea is to give teachers more latitude to cover topics in more depth, rather than breadth, and to take a cross-disciplinary approach.
Some critics suggest that the new approach risks leaving children with shallow foundations in core subjects like Math, which provide a firm foundation for appreciating and understanding other topics.
... Read moreOpen source has long been the ugly stepchild of UK government information technology, but in a recent turn of events, it may finally be gaining ground with the British.
As The Inquirer reports, two open-source companies, Novell UK and Sirius, have been granted access to the UK's £80 million ($149 million) Software for Educational Institutions Framework, which enables them to supply software to the UK public sector. There may be additional open-source vendors chosen but the official list won't be released until Wednesday, September 24.
How important is this selection? Very.
The UK's procurement frameworks, a fast-track process for public sector purchasers, handled £4.4bn of business in the year to April 2008. They are not meant to prevent companies not on the lists from selling to the public sector but, said (Mark) Taylor (CEO of Sirius), this had not been the experience of the Open Source community.
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In an attempt to get its Office 2007 program on the desktops of U.K. youth, The Register reports that Microsoft is saying all the right things to the U.K. government in its attempt to placate the European Commission over interoperability with open file formats. Everything, that is, except how it intends to make its software more interoperable
Now Microsoft has stepped in to appease some of the education tech body's grumbles by announcing a new Open Licensing Programme (OLP) for government that will launch at the start of next month.
The company said the OLP offered "a new way for public sector organisations to purchase software from Microsoft resellers" who will sell MS products at a discounted rate.
However, while offering Microsoft products with a reduced price tag to the public sector might be viewed by some as a move in the right direction, the firm didn't reveal how Office 2007 might be made more interoperable with other doc formats.
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" seems to be the strategy. Discounts are nice, but discounts only make it cheaper to fall into lock-in. The Open Source Consortium's president, Mark Taylor, says it well: "Schools can now choose between long-term software freedom or a short-term discount on the next lock-in play."
Fortunately, groups like Becta, which brought the original complaint against Microsoft to the European Commission, are unlikely to fall asleep at the wheel.
Microsoft will no doubt eventually be forced into offering interoperability alongside its discounts. As noted on InfoWorld, Microsoft has even made some strides toward a more peaceful future with open source, the kissing cousin to open standards.
It's just too bad that so much time must be wasted along the way.
The Guardian is reporting that the United Kingdom government has flushed over £2 billion (More than US$4 billion) since 2000 on failed IT projects. IT projects fail. It's a fact of life. It would be nice if the UK government weren't squandering so much with so few vendors, and if all the waste weren't locked up in proprietary software, and if it were mitigating its IT failure risk with open-source software.
Indeed, could there be a correlation to the UK government's fetish with Microsoft and seven other proprietary vendors? In other words, putting all of its IT eggs in just a few proprietary baskets doesn't seem to be working for the UK. Are the projects failing, in part, because the government is attempting to use proprietary, unwieldy software?
Or is it just a matter of incompetence? The Guardian writes:
The failure of the multimillion-pound police site marks the latest chapter in the government's litany of botched IT projects, with several costly schemes biting the dust. Blunders overseen by Downing Street have included the much-derided £486m computer upgrade at the Child Support Agency (CSA), which collapsed and forced a £1bn claims write-off, and an adult learning programme that was subjected to extensive fraud.
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Though they do it with a stiff upper lip, the Guardian reports that the UK's denizens are Europe's most promiscuous social networkers, with Britons more likely to engage in social networking than anyone else on the planet...except for Canadians, who also need friends.
Thanks to their growing obsession and the widespread availability of broadband, the UK leads Europe in using sites such as Facebook and MySpace, according to the study from the regulator Ofcom.
Its analysis suggests more UK adults go on social networking sites than their European neighbours and they visit them more frequently and for longer - an average 5.3 hours a month.
Interestingly, the UK is also the global leader in susceptibility to Internet advertising, spending more than France, Germany, and Italy combined. Perhaps Facebook's Beacon product would go swimmingly here while failing elsewhere.
Next time you see a Brit, give her a hug. She apparently needs it. Sure, she has money and great broadband, but what's that if she's so lonely?
As Slashdot reports, the UK government computer agency Becta is advising UK schools not to enmesh themselves in Microsoft's School Agreement subscription pricing. Why? Because while the subscription pricing may cost less, it actually introduces other problems:
Becta...suggests [schools] use instead what is known as "perpetual licensing"....
The advantage to schools in using a subscription service such as Microsoft's is that smaller, annual payments are involved rather than a larger one-off cost.
But a spokesman for Becta said the problem was that Microsoft required schools to have licences for every PC in a school that might use its software, whether they were actually doing so or running something else.
I have an even better suggestion. Get both perpetual rights to use and modify software to fit your needs, and pay a subscription to a vendor to deliver ongoing value. It's called open source. The UK hasn't dabbled much in this newfangled thing, but it's all the rage everywhere else.
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