UK Government Betrayal of Open Standards Confirmed | Hacker News Reader

UK Government Betrayal of Open Standards Confirmed

blogs.computerworlduk.com

As a Lib Dem, I'm actually very embarrassed about this. Especially since it was Vince Cable's department (BIS) who seems to have led the charge against OSS from within government. Ridiculous.

Are you a lib dem member or supporter? As someone who had optimistically voted for the lib dems in the last election, I think there are plenty of reasons for them to be embarrassed about their time in power. Anti-tech, anti-education policies are being proposed that we were led to believe the Lib Dems would be tempering, but from the point of view of the average person I can't see anything of the sort happening.

Member and campaigner. We have a major perception problem on that score - the work our ministers do tempering policy is inside the opaque government bubble, and the public (and indeed activists like me) have no idea who thought what before the unified public face of government is presented.

People on our democratic, party wide Federal Policy Committee have a better idea, because they're called in before decisions go public (I was astonished when I learned this, and greatly encouraged!)

I sincerely hope that the coalition process is made more open before we get to a 2015 "but we were saying this in private"-match during the election campaign (which would leave us looking either disingenuous, weak, or both.)

(Edited for grammar.)

If what you are saying is correct, then policy proposals from the Tories are even more insane than what bubbles up, which makes the whole idea of being in power with them even more distasteful. Considering the AV referendum is now gone, what's the point of staying with them any longer, apart from the occasional ministerial pension ?

What is the point of being in government and actually having influence over decisions that affect the lives of millions of people?

Power is a device to improve the world - you hold onto it for as long as you can to do the most good you can. Obviously "as long as you can" is defined in terms of democratic parameters (without which people would do significantly less good with their power.)

If tory policy is even more insane (scrapping all employment law, anyone* ?) then that makes it even more important for us to be in there fixing it.

* - no, really, from one of Cameron's advisers.

Do you have a citation for the claim that 'scrapping all employment law' was a Tory policy? Or do you mean that it was the viewpoint of one advisor (and so not Tory policy), or even that one advisor said something that might be construed in that way, or entertained the idea of such a thing?

Found them suggesting scraping unfair dismissal laws:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/10/26/unfair-dismissal-...

The original claim made was "If tory policy is even more insane (scrapping all employment law, anyone* ?)", "* - no, really, from one of Cameron's advisers."

According to the article this was never Tory policy, so that is false. The Huffington Post are a second hand source here, reporting on something in the Telegraph. The details of course aren't available in either, but what is in the Telegraph (who actually saw the thing) look more reasonable (whether one agrees with the gist of it is another thing).

It's also rather misleading to say "one of Cameron's advisors" which implies this is a paid employee, rather than a successful businessman who has been asked to make a report (I imagine the government ask for and receive many reports most of which they ignore or only take elements of).

I only meant to imply that this was a Tory suggestion - not a policy - apologies that it looked ambiguous in that sentence structure, it was not intentional.

Even "Tory suggestion" is quite misleading. Something relating to reducing the protection of workers against dismissal was suggested in a report by someone to the Tories.

No. This was Cameron's personal adviser who hangs out in number 10, it wasn't in a report.

His name is Steve Hilton, and he suggested (among other things) that Maternity leave be scrapped:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/86670...

Moderating their policies make them look better than they are, so they will stay in power for longer than they deserve, whereas a full-on minority government would have exposed them for the nutters they are.

I know we are arguing relatively small tactical moves, when looking at the grand scheme of things, but the grand scheme of things is built day by day by this sort of "small" moves.

It sounds a bit pretentious, but that's a conflict between tactics and national interest (tories look worse on their own, sure, but the country is also worse off) and the Lib Dems are choosing the national interest. It could mean we're just stupid, too, I'll grant you.

This sounds a bit suspicious to me - saying that the Lib Dems are the good guys who are tempering the bad policies of the Conservatives, but as it's all done in secret we can't see how good they are.

The Lib Dems pledged to oppose tuition fee rises for instance but in fact raised them from £3k to £9k, and apparently /planned/ to do so before coming in to power http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2010/11/14/lib-dems-plotted-t...

Well, it's my opinion. politics is the definition of subjective, alas!

"The Lib Dems" don't 'plan' stuff like that. We're a distributed party without any kind of hierarchy of command (to the extent that local parties often contradict one another, much to our opponents' mirth.) We have people at different levels making different decisions about policy for that level, sure, but we're not obliged to agree with people up the chain (as I certainly didn't and don't on Tuition Fees.) My local party, for example, strengthened a Labour council motion condemning the NHS bill, partly due to my urging.

Clegg was only ever a reluctant supporter of the Tuition Fees policy, but the NUS pledge was the NUS pledge, and all our candidates everywhere chose to sign it, including him. And 14 kept it and voted against the bill, too.

The Lib Dems have a reputation for saying whatever people want to hear, and it was suggested before the election that they would turn around when they were in power. I didn't think so so I voted for them, but I've now learned the error of my ways. Clegg's lies about the tuition fees policy is but one example. I doubt the public will be fooled a second time.

I'm sad you think so. So what we say/said on Europe, on Immigration, and on the Deficit even before the election, that was all "what people wanted to hear" was it?

Tuition fees was technically a lie, because all our MPs signed a "pledge" which some of them (more than half) then broke by voting for it or abstaining.

However, other examples are hard to find, because compromising on a manifesto to form a coalition is a legitimate reason to diverge from "what we said" in "what we're doing."

The Guardian did some analysis (which I can't seem to find now) that said something like 60% of our manifesto was being delivered under the coalition. I think that's pretty good going for the smaller partner, and while some of what the government is doing makes me good and angry (DLA 'assessments,' housing benefit changes especially in London, Tuition Fees, scrapping of PCTs, and so on), other bits are much better for it (the Tuition Fees repayment system, the Pupil Premium which was doubled again recently, raising the income tax threshold, the Youth Contract, and so on.)

err actually I think you (lib dems) have a lot more to worry about than some pious (used in its political sense here) belief by OS Zellots and hobby programmers that some how Open Office is a better solution than MS Office for a huge (largely non technical) user base.

The cost of a MS licence is so tiny when compared to the cost of employing some one - and when you factor in the cost of retraining it makes very good sense - whose hospitals or schools would you close to pay for all this.

This is about defending the coalition agreement, which has aspirations about open source software and open data in it that come straight out of the Lib Dem policy book.

Admittedly Europe wasn't (and OSS/Open Standards wouldn't be) the most electorally-useful topic to pick a fight on, but since when have Lib Dems ever done anything the easy way.

It's our policy, I and some of our voters care about it, and we won the concession off the tories during the coalition negotiation. That should be enough to make us fight for it, when the time comes.

Where governments are concerned, MS Office licences can be huge and will always be more expensive than free. They will always always be more restrictive too than free software, by definition.

I agree that a licence by itself won't be the biggest expense a government will have, but the sleazy insidious contracts that they are normally bundled with are the most dangerous aspects licensed software. One example: why do so many government institutions still use IE6? It's because of the eye-watering expenses they're obliged to pay to upgrade their own systems.

This type of type of contractual bondage must end. Especially when it comes to tax payers money. Unnecessary licences for sub standard MS software comes out of the same purse as that used to pay for life saving operations. It's always worth bearing this in mind.

Its not cheaper if you have to retain a lot of people - and Open office is not well liked by ordinary users "its shit" was one comment by a coworker at my last place

And look at any advert for a Govenment IT project its always to many chiefs and not enough experianced devlopers.

IE6 lock in is due to cheap and shoddy work by the "outsourced" developers and a lack of technical nous (incopentance being more blunt) in the specification stage PPI has a lot to answer for.

This article is a little vague.

Personally as a UK Taxpayer I don't really care whether the desktop PCs and downing street or Whitehall run Windows , Linux or Mac they could run Haiku for all I care.

What I am more concerned about as more government functions can be interfaced with online is whether this will be done using the most standard and open data formats etc possible.

If I need to buy a specific piece of proprietary software to submit my tax information online or if all applications for public sector jobs are distributed in the latest MS Word format that I can't open without buying a new version of Windows and office then that is something I at least potentially care about.

"f I need to buy a specific piece of proprietary software to submit my tax information online or if all applications for public sector jobs are distributed in the latest MS Word format that I can't open without buying a new version of Windows and office then that is something I at least potentially care about."

Thats the point of this Microsofts lobbying, lock-in. Can you today require open documents from your government? Here in Sweden, no. You get .doc most of the time, if it is a local government then perhaps a PDF.

For the most part you can, sometimes you will get a .doc it's almost always available in another format or it's an old enough .doc format that opening it is not an issue.

You can also grab lots of data from parliament in XML format and people have done some cool things with it (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/) for example.

There's lots of government depts that can be interacted with using various XML formats and they will provide you with all the schemas you need.

IMHO, these are not the only reasons you should be worried about. Pushing more microsoft proprietary software into local government means more your tax dollars will go to usa (not to usa government, probably, since there are so many tax schemes available).

On the other hand integrating open source software in organizations usually done with help of local companies, meaning your tax dollars spend on work your neighbor do. Since in this case you are not paying for "product", you are paying for integration of open source software. (as a bonus, it often also saves bucks on software products, even if you pay more for integration/training).

ps: not saying that during process of integration of open source software often changes/bug reports/feedback contributed back to open source community, which benefits all people...

We already buy a load of stuff for government from the USA. Regardless of what software they choose they will probably outsource the IT management to a US company anyway.

The British don't really make OS software anymore , so trying to buy british doesn't really make sense here.

I'm not so bothered about what the government chooses to buy, I am more worried about the government forcing it's citizens to buy specific software.

With open source software (which mostly uses open standards) you do not "buy" anything. Instead you adapt particular open source product (be it training, integration with other company's software, etc).

To do training most likely you need local training company. To do integration, I agree after certain project size it might be possible to outsource it to another country. But even then - you most likely end up outsourcing to India, not to USA. Which again - lower total price.

Most Government IT in the UK is outsourced to the British arms of consulting companies like EDS or Accenture. I suppose you are still employing British people but you would be even with an MS solution, the only difference is the licensing costs which may or may not be an issue.

I'm assuming MS licenses for workstations aren't that much of an issue otherwise FTSE 100 companies would not predominantly use it.

Point of order: Please be careful to distinguish between the concepts of open standards, portable data, and Open Source software in this discussion.

The article essentially lumps them together under the rubric of "not Microsoft."

Indeed, I hadn't spotted the difference - thanks.

Reading the linked articles, the Free Software lobby is saying that this decision will destroy the coalition agreement commitment to create a level playing field ( http://www.direct.gov.uk/prod_consum_dg/groups/dg_digitalass... p21, "Government Transparency", 8th bullet,) which may or may not be true.

Given that the argument is all about patent royalties on interfaces, though, that argument (that OSS, which doesn't do royalties ever, won't stand a chance) seems to hold water to me.

Just emailed 10 Downing street asking for an explanation, if they have one. I encourage other people to do the same.

Don't expect anything but a canned response. Something like, "We reviewed all the available options, and feel that Microsoft is the best solution for us."

Considering how the previous government blew 12 BILLION pounds of the nation's money on the infamous NHS project (http://www.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~ifs/Teaching/Socio-tech-syst...), I'd have thought they should now be treading very, very carefully in matters of national IT policy...

The author certainly didn't make an attempt at being objective or hiding his allegiances. Most humorous is his assertion that businesses should have no voice in the decisions of government because that is "interfering"

Isn't Office Open XML (Microsoft Office's XML format) an open standard, too?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_...

Can someone summarize what is going on in layman's terms?

The UK government is rolling back on a proposal to require that interfaces between components of Government purchased software comply with Open Standards (i.e. ones without attached patents).

This would prevent Open Source components being used (since they don't ever use patented Standards, since there is no vendor to pay royalties) and thus renege on a part of the "Government Transparency" section of the coalition agreement, which stated that Open Source Software should be given a level playing field in government procurement.

I know we have to use this shoddy half assed TCP/IP instead on the nice ITU/ISO standrads that all the countries agreed to years back :-)

(laughter)

Yeah, the people behind OSI should be forced to use the standards they designed :-)

well we did it was just you uppity Subs that spoiled that :-) I

The problem with this article is the sensationalism.

Did Microsoft lobby? Certainty, did they "interfere with a sovereign nation's decision to create a level playing-field"? Please, give me a break, they interfered with your desire to do something, and whether right or wrong, the last time I checked, you weren't a sovereign nation.

sorry? this decision relates to the government's own IT procurement, not anyone's right to use OSS.

I agree. And I agree the the government should use open standards. I just don't like the sensationalism of the article.

I believe the government should use whatever best serves the public welfare. Given that the bulk of the IT expense for a government is going to be support not initial purchase.

Open software requires support approximately as much as proprietary systems do. The unfortunate fact is that although one can call Microsoft technical support, one cannot "get Linux on the phone."

The open software ecosystem is changing for the worse - e.g. Oracle's IP strategy with regard to software developed by Sun, particularly the mission critical (for a government) Open Office suite.

Do not misunderstand me, I have political concerns about governments partnering with business as the gateway to a slippery slope.

Were this story about IBM rather than Microsoft, it would largely pass unnoticed on HN (and were it a story about government using iPads which depend on Apple's cloud the praise would be laid on so thick one would need hip waders).

one cannot "get Linux on the phone."

Oh please; both Canonical (Ubuntu) and Red Hat are more than happy to take your money in return for picking up the phone. Not only that there are hundreds of medium and small companies that will do the same, not mention the thousands of individual contractors. If not being able to pick up the phone and get someone on the other end to help with your Linux problems is bugging you, give me your money I'll be happy to fix your problem.

>"Canonical (Ubuntu) and Red Hat are more than happy to take your money in return for picking up the phone"

Keeping in mind that Linux is but a stand in for open source in general, of course they are as ready to take one's money as Microsoft is.

I suspect that Canonical is no more likely to recommend switching to a Red Hat distro than they are to recommend switching to Microsoft...and vice versa.

But to delve into the larger issue, is Canonical or Red Hat more expert in supporting Open Office or are one's citizens better served by a separate contract with Oracle for that support?

And if one doesn't go to Oracle for that support, does one switch to Office Libre and if so, who does a government hire to manage that switch?

At the scale of the UK government, there is no course which is free of vendor lock-in. Governments don't pivot.

Linux is an unfortunate example. If you're talking about support, you have to consider the entire ecosystem you're signing up for. That means equivalents for Windows, Exchange Server, Office, SQL Server, IIS, etc. etc. And while there are commercial companies happy to provide support for many of the big sticker OSS products, it is fair to say that many of the smaller projects -- the kind of glue that makes the Linux world actually good, when it works -- are not so well-supported. At least if you're dealing with hulking monsters like Microsoft, their more obscure back office applications and such are going to come with support as well, and they're not going to be able to fob you off by claiming it's someone else's project not following the spec when you can't get Outlook talking to Exchange Server or a .Net application served using IIS talking to SQL Server.

What I don't understand is why the UK doesn't have a government supported OS (probably best to have a linux distro I'd say) - a small fraction of the over-spend on a typical government run IT project (one of the NHS ones probably) would give you enough to buy Canonical and mould them to your will.

Some figures - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3734504.stm, single project overspend of £24 billion GBP (side issue: why isn't that the suppliers problem for arsing up their estimate); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_Ltd., gives Canonical revenue at around £30 million USD.

How the hell do they manage to arse things up so badly.

Support costs for the public sector are measured over decades, not years. In this sense, open standards are extremely critical: Microsoft won't sell you a copy of Word 95 anymore, and sooner or later they'll break compatibility with the format altogether. When that happens, millions of tiny open source violins will play a very loud symphony indeed ( http://xkcd.com/743/ ).

The UK is a sovereign nation.

Yes, but the author is not.

Lobbying is lobbying. It is not interfering. That's my point.

Considering that both the Conservatives and Lib Dems were trumpeting this before the elections only to drop it afterwards smacks of either deceit or stupidity; take your pick.

Trumpeting? It might have been touted as an element of policy after questioning, but "support for open standards" is never going to be a vote-winner in an election.

There is a large number of UK geeks who genuinely believed Tories and (especially) LibDems would have reduced the influence of Microsoft on public procurement once elected. I know because I've been surprised by this over and over (I live in the North of England, where being a Tory is, er, very unpopular by default, and with reason). For them, this issue was indeed a vote-winner, so this u-turn will hurt, especially among LibDems... but then again, hardly surprising by now.

Where did they interfere with the process? They paid handsomely to influence the decision making process. They didn't destroy supply lines so that the UK couldn't acquire a Linux CDs. There is a difference between influence and interference.

Agreed. From the way the article is written you would think that some Microsoft thugs held a gun to the Queen's head instead of, you know, lobbying for their interests.

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