[Fsfe-uk] Recent .gov developments

[Alex Hudson]

Guys,

Hopefully people will have noticed some of the news flying by on the
list; I'd particularly like to thank James Heald for keeping us so
thoroughly up-to-date with respect to both patents and IPRED. This
issues - and others - AFFS has been silent on so far, but we probably
ought to be making more noise.

- With regards IPRED, we ought to publish a press release ourselves,
probably timed a few days in front of the actual vote. Obviously our
tack will be slightly different to FFII's, but would cover much of the
same ground. Malcolm Harbour's statement is duly noted, and I daresay
this directive is as much aimed at people bringing Levii's jeans into
Europe, but it is horribly, horribly broad.

- Going onto a different issue, there is currently noise about OGC
spending on software (PA report 10; "Software licences", HC 306). I've
never looked at the Select Committee for Public Accounts before, but it
does contain some familiar names (Richard Allen MP [Hallam], Brian
Jenkins MP [Tamworth] for example both came to FLOSSIE, and Mr Allen
also came to see RMS IIRC) so it seems that this group have at least
some members who have come into contact with this "open source" thing
(interestingly, the definition they give in their report is more a
description of the GPL/copyleft...). Their graph on vendor usage:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmpubacc/306/30607.htm
.. is vaguely interesting. Lots of departments license Winzip, for
example, and there are many free software equivalents available. "Adobe"
are also quite big - I'm assuming this is mostly, or at least a fair
proportion, Acrobat licensing. Again, there are lots of equivalents. I
think there is room here for arguments that a) the trials they talk so
much about should be more publically available, b) full costings are
still not evident (Mr Boateng MP was the last to say that they had no
idea of the costs of all this software, as I recall). We could perhaps
start collecting some of these figures together (MoD, £69M worth of MS,
etc...) and put together a report ourselves. In fact, running our own
report into the costs of free software is quite a nice idea...

(BTW: this report is the partially the result of the session where the
chief executive of OGC buying gave us his "personal experience" of
playing with GNU/Linux for 3 hours and realising that it wasn't "cost
effective" for him to move from Microsoft).

(BTW2: if there was ever an argument against using "open source", it is
attempting to search the Parliament site post-Hutton and post-dossier; I
suspect the spook meaning is the older one by far)

Cheers,

Alex.