Re: [Fsfe-uk] dotP

[Graham Seaman]

Alex Hudson wrote:

> On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 21:53 +0000, Graham Seaman wrote:
>  
>
> > Richard Allen asked a parliamentary question about it and uncovered the 
> > fact that takeup of if has been awful:
> > http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2004-11-16.1237W.0&s=dotp#g1237W.2
> >    
>
> Hehehe. Is that a special glum Richard Allen for when he's asking about
> Govt IT spending, do you think?
>
> ~£40M (with more to come, I expect) on content management is possibly a
> trifle expensive, but it's basically BEA Weblogic. 
>
>  
What? They spent £35m on weblogic? How? And what they've done won't sit 
on top of anything else?

> > Why isn't it free software? Would  that have worked? Might it have made 
> > all these purchases of proprietary cms s unnecessary? Is it a possible 
> > campaign?
> >    
>
> Maybe, although free software CMSes aren't quite at the same level of
> sophistication (although, they do have a bulk import tool to bring in
> content, which apparently DoTP didn't have til 2004q4 ;). I would
> suspect Plone would have sufficed, though.
>
>  
No, I meant 'why isn't dotP free software'?  Developed with tax money, 
supposed to be used by as many departments as possible to recoup the 
expenses, and it's closed source? Why? What do they gain by that? 

And as for sophistication and government-oriented applications, ins't 
APLAWS+ supposed to be this?
Though if  dotP is a league above that, I still don't understand why it 
can't be free software - is it because they left the copyrights with 
their outsourced developers?

Graham

> It would be an interesting piece of research for someone to trawl
> through Hansard and the news sites, looking for costings of Govt. ICT
> solutions, and totting them up. I seem to remember Paul Boateng MP
> giving terribly evasive answers about IT costs, but there have been
> others which have been more definite. A free software solution could
> also be built upon, which you would have thought would mean those
> departments that went elsewhere - DTI/BusinessLink et al. - could have
> just developed what was already there. Bonus points, then, if the piece
> of research did projected cost savings.
>
> On a similar note, the free software field trials are also published -
> you can pick them up on various websites. OFE have a 50-page doc in
> their library, outlining the various trials. Most of them consist of IBM
> running Domino server on GNU/Linux. A similar "What if it were all free
> software?" could again be done; not just trying to say "X is costly, but
> Y is free, therefore free software could have delivered £Z savings", but
> working through the implications of the benefits of free software.
>
> If anyone feels like taking up the project(s) mail me; I have lots of
> sources you could start on ;)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alex.
>
>
>
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