As the economy suffers, and tax revenues start to fall, bearing down on spending within the public sector is becoming increasingly important. As just one example, the UK Government is looking for half a billion pounds of savings in the education sector’s total procurement costs. One would’ve thought, then, that open source software solutions such as Linux and OpenOffice, which have no licence fees associated with them, would be seeing an increase in take up.
Apparently not. At the Risk Management in Open Source Procurement conference in Oxford yesterday, speaker after speaker gave examples of other European countries with large-scale, public sector, open source procurement strategies. Notable examples that were mentioned included a 120,000 Linux-based desktop installment in schools across Macedonia and the outfitting of the French Parliament with open source-based desktop systems. But in the UK, we’re still lagging behind.
There are several reasons for this, but one of the most important is the number of barriers present in the process of procurement. It seems that open source software suppliers are not being offered a level playing field when it comes the bureaucratic procedures and check-lists involved in making procurement decisions within public sector bodies. A high profile example involves Becta, the school’s technology agency, and its recent decision not to include the popular open source package Moodle as a potential e-learning platform.
The good news is that, judging from the level of interest at the conference it seems there is growing willingness on the part of the public sector to work on this, alongside moves amongst open source developers to work together through consortia.
If this is something you’re interested in, watch this space. I’ve been commissioned to write up the main findings of the conference (in an interesting way!) so there will be more coming out on this in a few weeks’ time.
Tech Lunch 
Letting the train take the strain
April 1, 2008Comment to me by a member of the booking hall staff at a central European railway ticket office the other day:
“It would be cheaper for you to fly, you know.”
I have to confess, I was a bit taken aback. You don’t normally expect staff from one company to recommend the products of a competitor, but, more importantly, what hope have we of getting people out of ‘planes and onto high-speed rail if this is the attitude of the railway’s own staff?
For me, it’s not an option. My company has a ‘green’ travel policy and we go by train wherever possible, including Europe. It may take slightly longer (although this is not always as clear cut as some make out, when you consider the delays getting through airport check-in and baggage handling fiascos), but we use the time productively for work-based reading and just plain, old fashioned thinking. We also create far less CO2 into the bargain.
Planning these journeys is made much easier by a website that I’ve used for years and can wholeheartedly recommend: Mark Smith’s The Man in Seat Sixty-One. The site details what is required to travel, without flying, from the UK to any one of forty-odd European countries and many others further field.
Tags: man at seat sixty-one, rail travel
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