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

[Simon Waters]

ian wrote:
> 
>>There was an iniative at one point to share software between
>>departments, did anything become of this?
> 
> 
> No idea. I should think a lot might be fairly specific stuff not that
> helpful to others.

I think you'd be surprised. Okay I'm slighty biased as I worked for a
part of the MoD that dealt purely in information, so we had a lot of
programmers (even if most were classified as MoD Scientists).

Okay a lot of the software we wrote was weather specific, but there was
a lot of mapping, charting, satellite imagery work. GIS and related work
is almost universal amongst councils, and national government.

I suspect the real winners would be councils as it is those areas where
government is fragmented (I mean this not in a derogatory, but
descriptive way), where there is most waste through duplication.

Health ought to be a big winner, with each hospital having done it's own
thing, and administrative effort duplicated at the regional level, but
the government seems to have gone back to the delusion that it can
centrally plan national projects for health information systems - how
quickly we forget.

A lot of this software probably isn't 'very good', but then a lot of the
authors "knew" it would never be used outside of a small group of civil
servants, never be read by anyone else, this tends to change your
priorities.

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