Labour government has succeeded in lower gov IT costs

Steve ShinePosted on by
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As we warm up to a general election,  I want to dwell on the positive moves we have seen from the current government in trying to achieving the cost savings in public sector IT spend.

Last year the UK Government CIO, John Suffolk pushed out a world leading (in my opinion) policy revision on Open Standards, Open Source and Reuse in UK Government IT.  Rather than issue the policy then let it gather dust on the shelf, the Policy was refreshed a couple of weeks ago with some amendments to close the loop holes that current buyers and suppliers were [...] Continue Reading…

3D TV, Android, In-flight internet, Tablet PCs. The future is not so far away anymore

Steve ShinePosted on by
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I write and send this message from a plane travelling to San Francisco on United Airlines using in-flight internet access. Getting on-line was ridiculously easy, the connection was actually pretty good and the charge for five hours connectivity is $13; cheaper than many hotels. I even made a Skype call to my family at home (although that was probably pushing the bandwidth somewhat).

I know this service has been around for a while but it was the first time I had used it and was impressed. The plane was packed; it seemed to me that almost everyone was online. Less [...] Continue Reading…

CIOs can avoid costly database price increases with open source

Steve ShinePosted on by
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Last time I vented frustration over the effort invested into the Oracle/Sun/MySQL anti-trust case whilst the European Union ignores its profligate waste by paying whatever Oracle demands for its software. I finished off by commenting how glad I was that the private sector did not act like some Governments at which point I had to pause.

I recently celebrated my second anniversary in the world of open source. Prior to this I’d spent most of my working career inside large proprietary software vendors (apart from a three year stint working on oil rigs in some of the more inhospitable, but [...] Continue Reading…

EU objecting to Oracle Sun deal wastes tax payers money

Steve ShinePosted on by
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In April of this year Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun Microsystems for $7.4bn. Not long afterwards the European Union raised objections to these plans on the basis that MySQL (a tiny open source component of the Sun business) might in some way be in breach of anti-trust legislation. Last week it confirmed this position by issuing a “Statement of Objections”.

The fiddling:

I wonder how much of the EU’s (read: Taxpayer’s) money and time has been spent on this decision? Almost nobody, other than the EU and a few ex MySQL guys, seems to believe there are any reasonable [...] Continue Reading…