It's been quiet for a few days so I thought I'd draw this to your
attention (if you haven't already seen it):

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/gove...en_source.aspx

My sense is that the UK government has been rather slow to take an
interest in open source before now, compared with other European
governments.

Further to this I recently attended a presentation on the action plan
given by Andrew Stott, UK Government Deputy CIO in the Delivery and
Transformation Group, and Chair of the CTO Council, Cabinet Office. A
few key points I took from it were:

(1) the playing field is being levelled; open source solutions will not
be excluded from consideration during procurement just by virtue of
being open source; (2) the governemnt intends to challenge suppliers to
show that they have considered open source (i.e. explain why they
didn't offer open source); (3) the procurement criteria will not be
relaxed to favour or encourage open source solutions (i.e. this is
levelling of the playing field, not positive discrimination); (4) open
source vendors will have to pass the same tests of financial
stability, supportability, and acceptance as proprietary vendors; (5)
large integrators will continue to be favoured as suppliers; (6) there
is no reason why regional or local goverment must follow suit, but it
might--or not.

There was a number of familiar faces from Ingres Corp at the
presentation. It was hard to tell how many other open source DBMS folk
were there. There was one person from Sun and a few from IBM, but who
knows if they were wearing open source hats or just taking an interest.

--
Roy

UK Ingres User Association Conference 2009 will be on Tuesday June 9, 2009
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