UK tests open source waters (BBC News) [LWN.net]

The BBC News reports on what the UK's Office of Government Commerce is up to, and why it worries Microsoft. "The OGC has just announced a deal with IBM to trial open source software - programs where the source code is available to users to read, change and even give away to other people - in nine different areas of government." (Thanks to Dave Killick)

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UK tests open source waters (BBC News)

Posted Oct 14, 2003 9:35 UTC (Tue) by RvW (guest, #15989) [Link] (2 responses)

When will people finally start to empasize the use of "free standards" instead of "open source"! Thats where the debate ought to be according to me. If MS produced text and/or whatever type of document according to free standards instead or proprietory ones who would care less about what operating system and user software people use? What we need is free standards that will assure proper communication and exchange of information.

UK tests open source waters (BBC News)

Posted Oct 15, 2003 0:39 UTC (Wed) by hazelsct (guest, #3659) [Link] (1 responses)

I disagree. For a standard of sufficient complexity, only an open reference implementation is acceptable. Proprietary implementations are too often incomplete or buggy, e.g. SMB as the Samba people have discovered, and Apple has almost never adhered to their own OpenFirmware hardware interface specs; furthermore, the motivation to introduce proprietary features is extremely powerful. With open implementations, if there are shortcomings and bugs, we can fix them; if there are extra features not in the spec, they are in effect documented by the open code itself.

UK tests open source waters (BBC News)

Posted Oct 16, 2003 11:58 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

But if it's the government ...

You just say that if a citizen can't read a document, because the app you supplied contains an undocumented extension, then that is a breach of QoS punishable by a decently sized fine, an obligation to publish the extension, and an obligation to provide free upgrades to everybody on an older version.

I can't really see MS extending Office 2004 for government if they know it's suddenly going to trigger a requirement to give it away for free to everyone they hoped to push into paying for an upgrade ... :-)

And why should an open spec be a problem. Look at the current spec for the WordPerfect document format. WordPerfect did things so well that an "out of the box" install of 5.1+ (from 1994) can do a damn competent read of a document produced by WP10 (aka WP2K3).

Cheers,
Wol