Of Open Source, Microsoft, India and Paraguay

One of the recurrent recent themes of IT in the UK has been how moves to open source by local and central government have been stymied by Microsoft - the most famous example being the Newham Council saga. Of course, that's not a problem unique to the UK: it's a pattern repeated around the world, as some recent stories highlight.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Newham and the Prisoner's Dilemma

Yesterday I had another meeting with Richard Steel, CIO of Newham, who was generous with both his time and information. After our introductory session a few weeks ago, we got down to the nitty-gritty – the server side. I was impressed by spaghetti-like complexity of the diagram showing the links between the disparate services and their databases: running a borough is clearly an incredibly complex job, and it's clear that we are still in the early days of automating that process.

Two things emerged during the morning, one good, and one bad...

On Open Enterprise blog.

Newly in Newham

Those with good memories may recall that Richard Steel and I had something of a, er, discussion about open source in our respective blogs. This culminated in a suggestion from Richard...

On Open Enterprise blog.

This isn't “Open Source”

As a kind of pint-sized free software fidei defensor I feel obliged to counter some of the misconceptions that are put about on the subject around the Web. But I find myself in a slightly embarrassing situation here, in that I need to comment on some statements that have appeared in the virtual pages of Computerworld UK....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Is This the Season of Porcine Aerobatics?

On Open Enterprise blog.