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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Henry Bremridge wrote: > On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 07:28:39PM -0700, trewornan wrote: >> --- On Fri, 24/4/09, Paul Sutton <zleap@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> No company is going to save money by cutting jobs then go >>> and buy software at great cost, are they, >> Oh yes! Happens all the time. >> > > Two things about recessions: > > 1/ badly run companies tend to go bust. > 2/ they focus the mind on need to have as opposed to nice to have. > > If the Government switched to opensource then would > - Provide jobs > - Develop skills > - Cut costs > > The only thing we can do is lobby our representatives > > http://www.writetothem.com/ > > Henry even if a certain local authority was interested in open source I would not assume for one minute that they are also interested in providing jobs, developing skills or necessarily cutting costs. The time to prepare and implement conversion from proprietary to free software was during the good years when the conversion costs could have been absorbed .... the investment required now would be far too expensive and painful and would be seen politically as folly given the commercial sector is tightening its belt. Currently a lot of local authorities are loosing good staff with experience of the business model because of enforced Job Evaluation exercises that are not favourable to technically skilled people. Not that I want to sound negative but, given the "skills drain", the recession and the lack of political will to convert to open source / free software, I think your lobbying will fall of deaf ears..... If central government where really committed to open source / free software then the landscape would be very much different now. As it is the political noises made (in this country) about open source / free software are not currently on the "must do" list. More likely that local authorities will turn more and more to the "commissioning model" which will involve contracting out every last piece of IT work to some commercial facilitator like South West One (IBM consortium) or (even worse) Capita. Local government is highly political and there any process that can be out sourced means less responsibility / risk for the authority. The hope of council management is that the attention will be focused on the bad service provider than the bad choice of service provider when things go wrong. Legally the only thing that a Council has to do in house is run local / general election ballots. All other services can be contracted out. Out sourcing is the most viable option for management even if its been proven to be the least efficient use of tax payers money. Having said all that I wish you luck in your lobbying. Tom. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iEYEARECAAYFAkny7JsACgkQBX2gJWUv0is53ACePEYvarhgQ8O355FamM+uIztD g8cAni4jaa5ahlfOG4hxO8CI1T2Z+OXE =Tgis -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html