Power breakfast

[pozorvlak]

This morning I was at a breakfast meeting at the Scottish Parliament, hosted by Patrick Harvie MSP, about how to promote the adoption of free software (also known as open source software) by the Scottish public sector. Patrick's been pushing this for years, but keeps meeting a wall of incomprehension and indifference. The meeting was billed as a

Comments

[necaris]

Ooh, wow, a meeting with Eben Moglen!

Was any mention made of other European government projects to adopt free software (I'm thinking in particular of Wienux and LiMux)?

[pozorvlak]

Yeah, I was pretty stoked about it :-)

I don't remember specific mention being made of European government projects other than Iceland's (is Iceland part of Europe?), but I wasn't taking notes at the time and may have missed something. ISTR he mentioned India in a positive light.

[wholepint]

Interesting stuff. There seems to be a bit of a debate at the moment over moving to open source within the third sector too - motivated by the lack of tie in with suppliers and the FREE aspect, but then some people seem to have experienced a few problems finding replacement suppliers or developers who can actually work decently with the source code - because the original web agency put their own spin on the code to make it user friendly, or something similar. (Disclaimer - This is all anecdotal, based on posts I've read on charity web usergroups, but something I'm trying to find out more about (and learn more about as I go!) as I'm trying to convince our head of IT to move towards an open source CMS in the future. Like the Iceland example above, most (if not all) of our inhouse IT people are Microsoft trained, which creates more problems.)

If we did move to open source, ideally I'd like to put together a list of freelance developers we can work with.