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On 29/08/10 23:42, Grant Sewell wrote: > On Sun, 29 Aug 2010 19:37:55 +0100 > tom brough wrote: > >> Although I don't fully agree with handing sensitive information over >> to a cloud controlled by Google (or the Government's "G-cloud", the >> rest of this made a lot of sense). >> >> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/aug/26/local-government-spending-open-standards-saving > > I read through that article and all I could think of was "you're > missing the point". > > Yes it could save money, but given councils' habit of going "it's not > our money so we don't need to look at cost saving" I can't see that as > being the most important reason for chosing open source and open > standards. > > He only briefly touched on it and then quickly moved on to talk about > Google. > > *sigh* > > Grant > If you knew how much individual councils spend on Education Management Systems almost exclusively supplied by CAPITA you might change your mind. There are huge savings to be made, but yes savings is not the only or even possibly the main consideration for adopting open source. Actually I think the article was spot on. The point is that all government bodies are like sheep, and will do anything to tick a central government box (rather than look at what actually needs to be done on a case by case basis). If the central government tick box had "MUST use open source" next to it, then councils would be falling over each other to be first to tick the box. To a certain degree corporations have done the same in the past. First it was nobody gets fired for buying IBM... That changed to nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft .... Next? Its a stupid way of operating I agree, but its the only way that councilors can justify action to the electorate and ICT council officers can get on and do the job. If the change is mandated then councillors and ITC officers of the council no longer have to stick fingers in the air and make wild guesstimates about conversion costs and actual savings. Short term there will be massive overspends while conversion is in progress, unfortunately the time to do this was 7 years ago or so before the crunch, but nobody was interested then. The big "nasty" is big concerns like CAPTIA who are almost totally in control of government ICT procurement policy and action because central government has swallowed the "big is beautiful" line cast by such big names. Rather than looking a small contractors with open source backgrounds who can quickly and efficiently plug holes in requirements, central government has gone for big projects, "enterprise licensing" and lumbering dinosaur "all in" solutions that can not easily be adapted in times of continual change. Holing up enterprise licensing and "all in" solutions as examples of efficiencies instead of counting the real costs, (which is harder work). Unfortunately "G-cloud" is seen as the next "big is beautiful" solution without looking at the technical implications of security. I would be seriously worried if Google were to win such a contract, and have very deep concerns about government run G-cloud. Even mundane information about how much a particular citizen pays in council tax could be commercially exploited by concerns like Google. Google are very efficient at extracting and correlating information, giving Google the G-Cloud contract and you can kiss any last refuges of privacy good bye..... Things would not be much better under a government operated G-Cloud. But at least there is still (some) legislation that restricts commercial exploitation of "publicly" held data. Tom. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq