From Open Government to Open Contracting

One of the rationales behind opening up government data is that it provides greater transparency. That's particularly true in the field of procurement: too often in the past it has been hard to find why exactly all that money was spent, and on what. One of the undoubted achievements of the present UK government is to require much of that data to be made freely available for people to inspect, analyse and query.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Whatever Happened to the EU Interoperability Policy?

As readers of this blog will know, interoperability is a key issue in Europe at the moment. We are still waiting for the imminent version 2 of the European Interoperability Framework, where we will find out whether true restriction-free open standards will be recommended, on deeply-flawed ones based on FRAND licensing that for practical purposes exclude many free software projects.

On Open Enterprise blog.

EU Open Source Procurement Guidelines

Public sector procurement is becoming a real battleground for open source in Europe. There have been few successes, but lots of groundwork has been laid in the form of interoperability frameworks and suchlike - despite fierce rearguard actions by old-school software companies naturally alarmed about losing their cosy monopolies.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Tories Back Open Source Software...They Say

Evidence that open source and the more general concept of openness is becoming trendy: the politicians are bandying them around again. There was a flurry of this stuff last year, and here is the latest effort from the Tories....

On Open Enterprise blog.