Roger Munford wrote:
> He said that normally the Government (Civil Service) tend to try and
> do whatever everybody else is doing to protect themselves against
> criticism.
the lowest common denominator approach! Though there is some interesting
reading on why other governments don't want to be beholden to an
american company, but I suppose we love and trust the americans!
Bearing in mind his remit. It might be worth pulling out some stuff
about JISC and BECTA policy.
Becta published 3 reports in 2005 identifying benefits of OSS in
education. Though doesn't seem to have said much recently. They did
release a report last month slating Microsoft's educational licensing
practices, but I guess that ends up as mud slinging.
To my mind it seems insane for schools to pay for MS Office licenses for
teaching when their students have to pay again if they want to use the
same software at home. Format compatibility doesn't help much when what
you are trying to learn is how to use the interface. I teach use of MS
Office because the university doesn't have OO on its work stations. I
encourage students to use OO at home but for those that are struggling
anyway the change in interface is a step too much.
JISC has been funding lots of software development/research over the
last few years. Their criteria on ensuring the availability of research
output for future use has led to large amounts of the software they have
funded (maybe all of it) being open source.
The government has two policy documents on its use of OSS at [1] these
are dated 2001 and 2004 these aren't very exciting, surely there is
something more recent.
[1]
http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/policydocs/policydocs_list.asp?topic=61&subjecttitle=Open+Source+Software
--
Will Davies
