Searching around, I found this Can Whitehall open up to open source? - BBC News and was amazed on how much the Government waste. They could save BILLIONS of they went to Open Source.
One clip;
The Ministry of Defence was unable to provide a breakdown but says its biggest IT organisation DE&S ISS spent £40.7m on procuring software between February 2009 and March 2011.
Perhaps not a huge budget for such a big organisation but where did the money go?
They do mention a few products - much of it security software like McAfee Anti Virus - but do not say what individual items cost.
I’m no programming genius but couldn’t a firewall and virus killer be written INTO the OS?
By contrast, the Department for Schools did supply quite a lot of detail.
One item that caught my eye was £164,063 on something called Colligo Solution.
This is described as something which will “enhance the interoperability of Microsoft Office 2003 specifically Microsoft Outlook/Exchange 2003, with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007” for all of the department’s 3,500 staff.
WTF!!!
Bryan was not surprised that many of the government departments could not give us much detail on their software spending.
“Where a large private sector firm would almost certainly have some form of software asset register for audit purposes, there’s nothing like that in Whitehall,” he explained, “although they’re working on just that at the Cabinet Office.”
No wonder the country’s in such a state… The government are not audited here and can get away with loads (Hmm… I think I’ll buy myself a new PC and all the trimmings, thinks an MP)
It’s about time they switched.
Just read some comments…
icewombat
5th September 2011 - 8:36
We are a small software developer and sell to local goverment, recently we repeatidly are asked for ethnic, sexuality, gender and disability break downs before orders can be placed.
We lost an order last week because out of our 12 staff we didn’t have an asian employee. (We always refuse the sexuality question).
How are these conditions going to be maintained with open source software?
You have GOT to be JOKING… They LOST the contract due to NOT having an ASIAN employee…
Who’s the biggest racist here… the Government I think.