Could OS provide the answer?
Posted on April 14th, 2008 by sherrilynne
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Not one, but two, major UK ‘olitical parties have come up with the solution to all the problems that plague government information systems. And, they have both done it in the same week.
Incredibly, they have both come up with the very same solution — if you can believe the coincidence. It is called open source, a set of principles and practices on how to write software for which the source code is freely available.
Yes, both the Conservative and Labour parties have revealed policies based on the principles of open source computing and, ironically, both are claiming ‘ownership’ of the idea. Click here to read the rest of the Tech Talk column.
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Sorry to be the naysayer, but in my experience Open Source is just as problematic as “Closed source” or propriatory solutions.
I’ve worked for NHS contracts and am aware of some of the parts of the NHS NPfIT scheme, and the impending failure of it and - no doubt - the ID Cards system is not due to closed standards, it is due to bad project management and lack of IT knowledge by the government.
Open Source is not “free” or necassarily cheap, and while you could question Microsoft’s claim that Windows has a lower TCO than open source solutions such as Linux, open source has a tangible cost in terms of support - which is not always forthcoming.
I’m not entirely sure Google is anymore open source from the user point of view, either. Microsoft Live also has API’s which you can exploit to create mash-ups and intergrated solutions. The only difference is that Google is hosted on an open source platform - but a platform no-one knows the details of - so is it really that open?
Both parties are clueless when it comes to IT, and maybe the BCS should have a bigger part in government to try and educate them. Brown’s political forutnes are flagging, and Cameron hops and skips on anything that passes before his middle-class eyes. In my opinion they are just seizing on Open Source to try and distract the casual observer from both parties’ disastorous examples of IT project procurement and management.
One question: if the “big four” consulancies repeatedly foul up on big contracts - and now just desert them before they fail - why do they still use them?
A related blog post you might find interesting:
http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/program.x/archive/2006/10/12/How-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-Open-Source_3F00_.aspx
Thanks for weighing in Nathan
[...] Could OS provide the answer? This Tech Talk column looks at how two of the British political parties are striving ‘to [...]