On Sun, 2003-12-28 at 11:45, Malcolm Herbert wrote:
Personally, I now have a wider Govt view, beyond schools and feel that areas such as high-performance workstations; grid computing; enterprise level servers are areas which will have more impact in the coming year for open source in Govt. Institutions like the Met Office, Inland Revenue and universities continue to lead the way in implementing OSS policy for Govt, but it is still the private sector leading the way. The recent acquisition of Suse, Red Hat's profits and continued IBM, HP and Dell investment all mean that Becta and others will change. Like dinosaurs they will only look up at the inbound meteorite when its too late....
I agree, BECTA will be forced to change, the issue is really timescales.
Also why pay £12m a year for an organisation that really provides no
leadership? Schools can follow what happens elsewhere and there are far
less expensive ways of disseminating information.
You might well be right about enterprise level servers etc, but in this
forum we are interested in schools and there is continued progress in
developing the use of FLOSS in schools. This includes more desktop use
of GNU/Linux, more use on servers and most notably increasing take up of
OpenOffice.org despite anti-competitive practises by MS. We have to keep
plugging away at all fronts, from the local primary school to BECTA and
the DfES. Any individual might not be decisive in making things switch,
but every individual will have influence on speeding up that switch.
PS. Will Redhat be represented at the FLOSSIE conference? We do have the
Chairman of BECTA as the keynote speaker so we need representation of
Suse and Redhat there to show that they take education seriously. We
will definitely have Mandrake representation ;-)
Regards,
--
ian