Re: [Fsfe-uk] BECTA discriminate against FLOSS?

[Simon Waters]

ian wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-12-22 at 00:49, Robin Green wrote:
> 
>>A pro-private-sector bureaucrat is, I would guess, likely to reply along
>>the lines of "Assuming what you say is true, why won't/hasn't some corporation
>>do/done that already - they could then sell it to us to recoup their
>>investment?"
> 
> Sun has already done this in effect by buying Star Corp and releasing
> the code. The reason why they haven't sold to the DfES I guess is that
> the DfES has not asked them and they don't know what the DfES want. If
> of course the DfES put out a tender for the work to be done, proving
> there was a demand I guess there would be many bidders probably
> including Sun.

SUN use a licensing scheme that allows them to charge for value added
components of the product undr Star Office.

Also SUN were on a fairly safe bet with an Office clone that there was
demand for such a product.

It is less obvious there is demand for a Linux based School
Administration system, so I'm not about to risk many months of my life
creating it, especialy under a licence where I can ony guarantee selling
one copy.

Tom on our list strongly advocates sharing the Curriculum related
material teachers produce themselves. Making sure if someone scratches
an itch, that it is recorded (and shared), so to speak.

> Quite so, but they have to make the transition to seeing things in this
> way. Mind I would prefer software not to be under Crown copyright. GPL
> would be much better. 

Ay, that's the key. Where the software has already been written, let it
free.

Rightly or wrongly I fear too many civil servants think if there is
"value" in their code their department should extract the maximum
possible value. The result a lot of perfectly good software rots on
government computers because the departments are set up to sell this
"property". I know I wrote plenty of it.

There was an iniative at one point to share software between
departments, did anything become of this?

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