BECTA Rubbishes Almost the Entire UK Open Source Industry

On Open Enterprise blog.

JISC for Fun

I've written before about what seems to me the huge missed opportunity for free software in education. Of course, this is a two-way thing: as well as coders making more effort to serve the education sector, it would be nice to see education deploying more open source.

And hey presto, along comes the Joint Informaton Systems Committee (JISC), a government-funded UK body that offers advice and strategic guidance to further and higher education establishements, with a neat briefing paper on the very subject. What makes this doubly interesting is that last year it published a similar paper on open access: clearly things are beginning to click here.

What makes this trebly interesting - well, to me at least - is that I've been asked to speak at the Open Source and Sustainability conference in Oxford this April, organised by the JISC-funded OSS Watch.

"JISC for fun" as Linus almost said.