Blog Entries tagged 'Politics'

Has Becta presided over the collapse of the UK PC industry?

tcallway — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:00:00 +0100

Last summer the list of ‘thriving’ UK PC manufacturers contained a very familiar list of players. These were RM plc, Akhter plc, Evesham Computers Ltd and Viglen Ltd.

The industry collectively had concentrated on the public sector market, especially the education sector, since it was becoming clear that retail selling in an ultra cut-throat market was untenable.

The dangers of retail se [...]

Can we give every school child in the UK a Linux notebook and still save money?

jspencer — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:00:00 +0100

The simple answer is 'yes' we could do it now and we will save the taxpayer millions of pounds.

In previous posts I have documented the exponential rise in school ICT costs over the past 20 years. The articles focussed on costing ICT fully. This meant summing the costs of software purchase, software licensing, hardware replacement cycle, support costs and&nbs [...]

Interview: Steve McIntyre, Debian Project Lead

tcallway — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Steve McIntyre is a software engineer and a long-time Debian developer. His best known contributions have been in the field of creating Debian CD/DVD images; he is the debian-cd team leader and is responsible for generating the official images. McIntyre ran for the post of Debian Project Leader in 2006 but was defeated by Anthony Towns by only six effective votes. In 2 [...]

The Learning Platform Stitch-up Uncovered

jspencer — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Big business appears to be closing ranks in order to force UK schools to use non-interoperable Microsoft-based databases despite determined efforts from the UK Government to introduce the UK Schools Interoperability Framework (SIF). The dominant vendors, Capita and Serco have withdrawn from Becta's SIF trials and are lobbying the Government to support their opposition to SIF.

In order [...]

Microsoft Tax on Linux in Schools must end says Becta

jspencer — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

John Spencer talks to Dr Stephen Lucey, who having joined Becta in 2000 is now their Executive Director (Strategic Technologies). Becta is the Governmental organisation which has oversight of all things ICT in UK schools. Specifically, apart from being a general advocate for ICT in schools, it is charged with providing strategic leadership, technical direction and advice on obtaining best value.
[...]

Is Becta loosening Microsoft's grip on UK schools?

jspencer — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Becta's massive school database interoperability project (SIF) will create huge opportunities for Open Source software companies.

Hitherto, competition in the school's database market has been minimal due to schools being locked-in to proprietary, non-interoperable software normally based on Microsoft MS-SQL.

Capita-SIMS, the powerful and dominant schools database provider, has been instruct [...]

Interview: Tim Pearson, CEO at RM plc on interoperability and software patents

jspencer — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

John Spencer talks to Tim Pearson Chief Executive of RM. RM is the largest
most successful supplier of ICT to the UK education market and, for good measure, is British too. Tim has been there from the start and so is really now Mr RM. This autumn he gave the school ICT world a jolt when RM announced its Asus miniBook. It retails to schools for only £169 and runs Open Source software throughout. The miniBook has preceded an ava [...]

Open Source software is the only way to deliver sustainable savings in public sector IT

mtaylor — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Things could hardly be tougher in the Whitehall front line. Last year Gordon Brown made it clear in his budget speech just what he expects – 4% annual growth in spending on front line services financed out of just 2% overall budget growth.

Enacting this latter day miracle of loaves and fishes is not going to be easy. But it will not happen at all unless Whitehall ends its chronic failure to use mar [...]

Open Source in schools could save the taxpayer billions

jspencer — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0100

In a previous 2005 report the Government quango Becta showed that schools could effect considerable savings by making use of Free Open Source software such as Open Office. In their study they simply looked at 'like for like' software replacement using existing networks and computers.

Since this study we have seen the emergence of the new breed of ultra-portable Linux-based computers aimed squarely at the education sector and the inexorable build of Web 2 services such as Google Apps [...]

Freewash, fake beards, and the enclosure of the software commons

mtaylor — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0100

The 20th February 2008 was one of those 'Microsoft moments', when suddenly, the world changed. Just like when they 'got' the network (and we got NT), or they 'got' the Internet (and we got 'Internet Explorer'). This time they 'got' Open Source and Open Standards and the company is about to make another of their legendary radical transformations... or so they would [...]

Vista - does its future really matter?

tcallway — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Application Development Trends, 18/02/2008:

Roughly half (53 percent) of respondents said that they "have no plans to deploy Vista at this time." Other plans for Vista included installing it for testing (18 percent), new machines only (14 percent) and other uses (two percent). Just 13 percent said they planned to be fully deployed on Vista.

Glyn Moody's "Open..." Blog, 18/02/2008:

In the face of this evid [...]

SCO: it's not about winning but continuing the FUD

tcallway — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0100

ITPro 15/02/2008:

Merely weeks after warning its shareholders that it's Unix litigation against Novell and other vendors may leave them with nothing, SCO late yesterday revealed it had received a potential $100-million (£50.8-million), private equity bailout offer..[from Stephen Norris & Company Capital - SNCP]

Groklaw 15/02/2008:

It's a takeover, whereby they give SCO $5 million, a [...]