On Sat, 2011-11-19 at 20:09 +0000, Avi Greenbury wrote: > Chris Rowson wrote: > > > The 'All About Open Source' document is particularly interesting > > because it explains why UK.gov can't mandate Open Source software. > > It's not entirely straight forward; I'm not entirely sure, but I > > think it means to say that UK.gov considers 'Open Source' a product > > (perhaps like Microsoft) rather than a feature and so that mandating > > a specific product is a breach on antitrust law? Thoughts? > > Well, it makes perfect sense. Why would mandating proprietary software > be bad but mandating open source sofftware be alright? The issue in > question, surely, is the quality of the software to do what it's > intended to do, not just what license it's provided under. Sure, the > license is part of the definition of how good the software is at its > job, but it's not the totality of it.
Your argument is very interesting. What prevents Microsoft from releasing open source software? Nothing (in fact, MS has some open source projects). The license it's not a technical feature (although it has some good consequences we all know; see: no vendor lock-in, better development model, customization, etc). So I don't understand why the government makes that distinction. The only point I can see relevant it's the fact that acquiring a license for a privative product it actually includes some sort of guaranty that by definition it's not available in a open source license by default. But you're buying privative software from a specific vendor (say Microsoft) + support associated to that license, and that works exactly the same with open source, it's just that you don't pay per license but ONLY for the support. I don't know the details about UK gov, but in Spain the government pays an absurd amount of money just for the licenses, and then pays for support... frequently from a third party (probably the vendor providing the hardware, with a partnership with the software vendor). It's unlikely that government will stop paying for support, but you can avoid the licensing costs. They're abusing the antitrust law to protect the privative software model. Regards, Juan -- jjm's home: http://www.usebox.net/jjm/ blackshell: http://blackshell.usebox.net/ en_GB@blog: http://engbblog.wordpress.com/ -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
