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Although the European Commission might be proud of its record of hitting Microsoft with fines that dig deep into Redmond’s seemingly bottomless coffers, the fact is that for many European countries, Microsoft is still the first and sometimes only choice when it comes to government tenders.

As last week’s Switzerland example showed, some government’s operate on the basis that IT is basically another word for Microsoft. That means tenders that specifically call for Microsoft products as if no other alternatives exist. Hungary – where I am currently based – only a month ago agreed to put open source options on the tender list for government tech projects. Previously, government tenders would simply state, “Microsoft or equivalent products”. Microsoft has splashed its cash around the country both in terms of marketing and lobbying that it has much of the public sector sown-up, as open source guru Richard Stallman remarked on a recent visit to Budapest.

And let’s not forget that the UK only just agreed to “level the playing field for open source” software – basically admitting that up till now the game has been firmly rigged against non-proprietary software. That said – that doesn’t meant that all UK government projects are considering open source all of a sudden. The head of IT for the Olympics told me at a recent green IT conference that he had more or less ruled out open source because it was “high risk” in terms of issues such as application compatibility.

Yep – it seems that while the Olympics might carry lofty ideals of international cooperation and openness – that doesn’t actually carry to the software running the event. And it’s not like the Olympics has money to burn – the event is way over budget already by billions of pounds – you’d think that the organising committee would be looking for the most cost-effective options available. Time’s are tough it seems but not tough enough for some

Piece I did for CIO Magazine has just gone live online:

Planning for a server outage, a power cut or half your staff being taken ill from a rogue batch of sushi at the company party are all probably within the ability range of most competent managers. But if things escalate, it’s time to call in the professionals.

The comfort and confidence that knowing the police, ambulance or even military are there to help if things take a real turn for the worse is just as vital to oiling the wheels of commerce as an effective regulatory or financial system. Luckily, as recent history has shown, the systems underpinning the police and military are more robust than those found in some areas of the City or Wall Street. A global financial crisis has been punishing enough, but imagine a similar meltdown in health provision, law enforcement or even the army.

The perception that law-enforcement agencies and the military adhere to more rigorous standards than the average citizen goes a long way to explaining the swathes of ex-army and law-enforcement types in the upper echelons of business. In the IT sector, companies including Microsoft, Unisys, Verizon and Xerox have all hired former military, intelligence or law-enforcement personnel. Tracking down exact numbers for how many IT professionals have come from law enforcement or the army is not easy but, for those personnel with technical experience, the computer industry is a natural progression. However, it’s not only technical skills that make these individuals attractive; the abilities to stay calm in a crisis and deal with pressure are also highly valued.

For more go to CIO.co.uk

Just got back from a pretty hectic week in London trying to see everyone I needed to for work and friends too. Two days was spent at the Green IT Conference ’09 in the Business Design Centre in Islington. Some people thought it was much smaller than last year – which I guess is not surprising – but still managed to attract some good speakers including Paul Coby, BA’s CIO and several government bods too including the rapacious Catalina McGregor – a government IT champion no less.

You can check out all my reporting on eWeek Europe UK (yes it is a long and unwieldy name but at least its descriptive)

Government Demands Green IT Metrics As Standard

The UK Department for Work and Pensions says it won’t pay extra for information about the carbon impact and efficiency of IT products and services

Suppliers who try to charge end-users extra for supplying metrics about the carbon impact and energy usage of their equipment will get short-shrift from government departments such as the Department of Work and Pensions.

More…

UK Will Get Tough on “Sweating” IT Assets

Green IT is not just about energy efficiency, the length of time that equipment is used is also key to improving sustainability, according to the government

Government IT departments could be asked to use some IT equipment for up to ten years and avoid unnecessary refreshes according to the body leading green tech regulation in the UK.

More…

UK Claims World’s First “Mandated” Green IT Targets

An update to the Greening Government ICT strategy this July will include 10 “mandated targets”.. but will that mandate be backed with penalties?

The UK has become the first country in the world to have mandated green IT targets for government CIOs, according to the Cabinet Office deputy champion for green ICT.

More…

BA: Too Much Vendor “Bollocks” In Green IT

The chief information officer of BA defended the airline’s green efforts – while sniping at “greenwash” from IT vendors

Vendors need to provide clear advice to companies around sustainable technologies and less hype and spin according to the chief information officer of British Airways.

More.

(I did loads more but that should do for anyone who’s interested.)

Another recession focused piece for Silicon.com…

Times are tough. Yet while IT budgets are tight, most companies still expect their systems to carry on delivering and supporting the rest of the business. In fact, the more progressive companies are even looking at ways to use IT to help them get ahead during the downturn.

While it may make sense to try and innovate right now, for many IT departments doing so will feel like a strain on already thin resources. According to research from analyst Gartner, IT spending is set to drop by around 3.8 per cent this year to just over $3.2tr.

Gartner predicts that in 2009 the IT market will decline by more than 2.1 per cent – the drop we saw during the dot-com bust of 2001.

On the positive side there is still more than £2tr sloshing around the global IT industry – so what can companies do to make the most of the resources they have?

For starters, businesses can’t afford to waste money on failed projects. So assessing and measuring risk must form a key part of any IT planning in this downturn

For more go to: Silicon.com

Temporarily based in Hungary as I am – been here in Budapest for a couple of months – anything Hungarian in the news gets my attention. 

Right now it’s mostly how the Hungarian economy is in meltdown – the PM quit on Saturday – but every now and again there is a bit of good news. A lot of that happens when I find another famous person who turns out to be Hungarian. 

There are loads of them from obvious ones such as George Soros to Tony Curtis and Jerry Seinfeld. 

But the most newsworthy at the moment is Charles Simonyi who has just blasted into space for the second time on a Russian Soyuz space mission – with a bit of help from the US. While a lot of Hungarians might be justifiable proud of Simonyi – swathes of the open source community might not be as well disposed to the creator of Microsoft Office. Wikipedia has all the skinny.

Interestingly from an open source perspective – I saw free software campaigner and GNU Founder Richard Stallman speak in Budapest recently. Stallman was on fine form as usual criticising everything from EU adoption of open source to the links between green and free software – but he missed the chance to berate the Hungarians for Simonyi’s Office development. But then again Simonyi did all his work in the US so guess Hungarians can just take the credit for the good stuff 😉

You can read the Stallman interview here:

Interview I did with Nick Mailer, one of the founders of the Positive Internet Company. an open source only hosting company who host content for people such as Stephen Fry, Ricky Gervais and uber-geeks such as Richard Stallman.

Open source at the business end

When Nick Mailer helped found web-hosting provider The Positive Internet Company, he was instrumental in basing the firm’s activities on free and open-source software. Mailer talks to ZDNet UK about the response from business to that open-source decision.

Actor Stephen Fry’s support of Twitter has been credited with pushing the micro-blogging tool into the mainstream. But his support for all things open source has been equally impassioned, and Fry recently singled out the company that hosts his podcasts for its dedication to open source. “My thanks as always go to the team at The Positive Internet Company. For 10 years they have used only free and open-source technologies like GNU Linux in their organisation,” Fry said.

Side-stepping venture capital funding in favour of organic growth, Positive was financed by turnover from day one, and has built its reputation in the hosting arena through an uncompromising attitude to open source and its cost benefits.

Clients for Positive’s dedicated server and managed hosting services include the British Film Institute (BFI), Stella Artois, the BBC and Barclays bank.

ZDNet UK caught up with Positive co-founder and director Nick Mailer to discover the origins of his company’s belief in open source and the downsides, if any, to running a purely free and open-source software business.

Q: Stephen Fry has said nice things about your devotion to open source and your expertise in hosting — how did that relationship come about?
A: With Stephen Fry there was an interesting osmosis between him and us and free software. His people liked our use of free software and had also heard good things about us through word of mouth and how we had done things for Ricky [Gervais]. Subsequently Stephen Fry has become a big fan of free software and in fact he recorded a birthday video for the GNU Project.

It is interesting that people who are thinking about things outside the immediate technical community are finding interesting ideas going on in free software. I suppose things like Creative Commons have opened that up to a wider sphere of people.

For more go to ZDNet.co.uk

Eweek, the big US tech mag and website has launched a web presence in UK. I have signed on as a freelance reporter and news-editor to cover green IT and sustainability.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Following on from the news yesterday about the UK government’s magnanimous decision to give open source a “level playing field” (is that an admission that the government hasn’t treated open source providers fairly in the past?) – the boss of UK IT professional organisation SOCITM has given his take on the announcement.

Richard Steel, head of the society for public sector IT managers, has written a blog entry on the issue claiming that:

“Open Source” software development, in my experience, lags proprietary development by several years. I don’t think we could achieve the anytime, anywhere fixed and mobile infrastructure with tele-presence we require, now, for flexible and new ways of working using only Open Source”

And:

“I don’t like the term “Open Source”. It’s misleading; what many people mean is “anything but Microsoft”; few businesses actually use open source directly – they buy software derived from open source that has been commercially packaged and sold with support, which, in practice, is little different to licensed software.”

Steel’s less than enthusiastic, (or is should that be boldly pragmatic?) take on open source won’t come as a surprise to some in the FOSS community.

Steel, also CIO at the London Borough of Newham, has been painted as executing a u-turned on plans to use open source software back in 2004, choosing to with Microsoft instead.

Open source lags prop development? Hmmm, I wonder how many updates to Fedora, Suse Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu happened during the time it took Microsoft to get Vista out of the door? But that might not be a fair comparison given installed base of Linux versus Windows. Still not sure that Steel’s comments hold water at all.

A good account of the Newham Microsoft issue here and Steel’s take on it:

Steel’s full blog entry on the government’s open source announcement here:

Only just noticed that ZDNet.co.uk has updated the way it displays video. This a good thing as it means that I can now embed some of the video I shot while I worked on the site – from 2003 to 2008 – on some of my other blogs.There is loads of great content on ZD (not just my own obviously) so it’s good to delve into the archives and look around.This a video I shot in Kenya back in 2007 as part of a trip in cooperation with IT charity Computer Aid to see how the technology the charity collects from UK businesses is used by hospitals and schools in the developing world. This video looks at how Computer Aid works with a fantastic organisation called AMREF which operates a flying doctors service in Africa.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

This is the story I wrote for Eweek Europe on the UK gov take on open source:

The UK government has announced that open source could be key to helping the public sector cut IT costs during the downturn with some commentators claiming savings could be as much as £600m a year.

In a statement released late on Tuesday, the government announced what it claimed was a new policy on open source that should “ensure maximum value for money for taxpayers”.

The new policy is a reaction to the development of open source and the government’s approach to IT, said the minister for digital engagement, Tom Watson: “The world of technology has moved on hugely since we last set out our thinking on Open Source, which is why it was so important to update our policy,” he said.

The decision to encourage greater use of open source was also based on greater support for community development by IT vendors, he said:  “Open Source products are more competitive and have become easier to include in business, and major players in the IT industry now support the use of Open Standards.”

In fact, most leading vendors have been selling or open source products for several years, including the industry stalwarts such as IBM, HP, Sun and Dell.

Microsoft, which supplies IT to numerous government departments and public sector organisations, has only recently begun to work with the open source community and support truly open standards.

Open source providers and the UK open source community welcomed the announcement, saying that as long as the government doesn’t fall prey to proprietary versions of the open source message, it could save large amounts of money on public sector IT budgets.

For more go to: UK Government To Save £600m With Open Source