James.Rocks@equant.com wrote:
Ben Rosenburg:
Yeah, I guess Tony Blair selling out the Brits to Microsoft and letting Microsoft setup a gateway to Government services that excluded people using non-microsoft browsers isn't selling out. :)
Are you sure this is true? I know our governement can be a bunch of morons at times but this sounds a bit dubious to me ... there are lots of people out there with non MS browsers (not just Linux users)! Maybe they did it then stepped back?
Do you have an official link for it?
http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/ The stuff on open source appeared a few days after I wrote to the minister but it was clear that they were not interested. Initially the site banned anyone other than M$ but the Government backtracked quickly when they realised that that might be embarrasing. Now you can view the pages with most browsers but can't use services without M$. It appers that some of the ukonline pages are more friendly, particularly the ones devoid of meaningful content. The UK Government appears to have given away to M$ for free any IP rights that arise from their site. Presumably M$ have given them some "help" in designing their site, which would certainly explain some of the inconsistencies between what they say about their site and what M$ say about it. Have a look on http://www.microsoft.com/ and http://www.theregister.co.uk/ for a bit more information.