

Ask HN: looking for "war stories" getting OSS into UK (local) government - lifeisstillgood

I have for various reasons become stung into running a fringe meeting at July's Local Government Associations annual meeting. The idea is I perceive a catch-22 in OSS in local govt - for the stuff that governments alone do, no one who can code has an itch so there are no prebuilt packages so OSS is at a disadvantage to proprietary<p>I want to gee up enough council leaders to agree to stop paying proprietary companies and pool funds to develop open software - and am looking for anyone with experience (good bad indifferent) trying to get OSS off ground in uk government.<p>Please comment or contact me from my profile
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bmelton
The biggest trick is in figuring out how to get them to pay for it.

I've found, at least in the US Federal Government, that OSS is usually
considered 'good' at all levels. Occasionally there is skepticism, but
generally, it's viewed positively.

However, what many OSS apps lack is a backing company to engage for support. A
scenario, if you will:

I am the CTO of a federal agency, and I am looking to cut costs over the long
run and replace an aging legacy system. I see that OSS_APP_A is a direct drop-
in with minimal switching costs, however, OSS_APP_A has no 'RedHat, Inc'
behind it. OSS_APP_B however, doesn't appear to be quite as fully featured,
and would probably require contracting time to fully switch over, which we can
hire 'OSS_APP_B, Inc' to do. If it breaks, we can call 'OSS_APP_B, Inc', and
we can hire them to do the work. Also, if it fails, we can blame them and get
out of paying on the contract until such time it is fixed.

Open source is nice, but in government, generally, systems are more critical
than others. Swapping out their office suite to OpenOffice is probably a no-
brainer, but swapping out Microsoft IIS for Apache is a little scarier,
because what happens if it breaks? So they don't use Apache, they instead hire
a company like Covalent which offers a little value-add on top of Apache, but
basically, they're "someone to blame" if/when it doesn't work.

If there's a particular piece of software you'd like to push, and it doesn't
have some kind of formal backing, you might consider that a business
opportunity. Though federal sales is hard and trying, it can also be quite
lucrative, at least in the US.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
bmelton - thank you for your reply.

I am guessing you are _not_ the CTO of a federal agency and are just talking
rhetorically (otherwise I am _very_ impressed with HN)

I believe federal sales and their equivalent is profitatble because it needs
to be to make up for the effort !

I mostly think that there are few drop-in replacements without systems-
integration. But what I am hoping to do is to start a culture of ... well
paying developers rather than paying proprietary companies. I have a suspicion
that a pool of government funds and a community steered openly (sort of like
debian project) would allow agencies to say if the debian-alike project acts
as developer-of-last-resort we will arrange to pay for OSS devs to come in.

Still in the planning stages, but if you have any specifics please ping me

cheers

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lifeisstillgood
To be clear this is at the moment a pro-bono thing - darn it, if you are using
my tax money to pay for software it had better be free and open.

I am writing up some of this at www.mikadosoftware.com but its hardly a
campaign site right now !

