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Re: [LUG] At last some common sense

 

On 29/08/10 23:42, Grant Sewell wrote:
> On Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:37:55 +0100
> tom brough wrote:
> 
>> Although I don't fully agree with handing sensitive information over
>> to a cloud controlled by Google (or the Government's "G-cloud", the
>> rest of this made a lot of sense).
>>
>> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/aug/26/local-government-spending-open-standards-saving
> 
> I read through that article and all I could think of was "you're
> missing the point".
> 
> Yes it could save money, but given councils' habit of going "it's not
> our money so we don't need to look at cost saving" I can't see that as
> being the most important reason for chosing open source and open
> standards.
> 
> He only briefly touched on it and then quickly moved on to talk about
> Google.
> 
> *sigh*
> 
> Grant
> 

If you knew how much individual councils spend on Education Management
Systems almost exclusively supplied by CAPITA you might change your
mind. There are huge savings to be made, but yes savings is not the only
or even possibly the main consideration for adopting open source.

Actually I think the article was spot on. The point is that all
government bodies are like sheep, and will do anything to tick a central
government box (rather than look at what actually needs to be done on a
case by case basis). If the central government tick box had "MUST use
open source" next to it, then councils would be falling over each other
to be first to tick the box.

To a certain degree corporations have done the same in the past. First
it was nobody gets fired for buying IBM... That changed to nobody gets
fired for buying Microsoft .... Next?

Its a stupid way of operating I agree, but its the only way that
councilors can justify action to the electorate and ICT council officers
can get on and do the job. If the change is mandated then councillors
and ITC officers of the council no longer have to stick fingers in the
air and make wild guesstimates about conversion costs and actual
savings. Short term there will be massive overspends while conversion is
in progress, unfortunately the time to do this was 7 years ago or so
before the crunch, but nobody was interested then.

The big "nasty" is big concerns like CAPTIA who are almost totally in
control of government ICT procurement policy and action because central
government has swallowed the "big is beautiful" line cast by such big names.

Rather than looking a small contractors with open source backgrounds who
can quickly and efficiently plug holes in requirements, central
government has gone for big projects, "enterprise licensing" and
lumbering dinosaur "all in" solutions that can not easily be adapted in
times of continual change. Holing up enterprise licensing and "all in"
solutions as examples of efficiencies instead of counting the real
costs, (which is harder work).

Unfortunately "G-cloud" is seen as the next "big is beautiful" solution
without looking at the technical implications of security. I would be
seriously worried if Google were to win such a contract, and have very
deep concerns about government run G-cloud.

Even mundane information about how much a particular citizen pays in
council tax could be commercially exploited by concerns like Google.
Google are very efficient at extracting and correlating information,
giving Google the G-Cloud contract and you can kiss any last refuges of
privacy good bye.....

Things would not be much better under a government operated G-Cloud. But
at least there is still (some) legislation that restricts commercial
exploitation of "publicly" held data.

Tom.


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