How is the UK doing for Open Source Adoption? 38
munchola writes "CBRonline has put together an article looking at the state of open source adoption in the UK , bringing together data on central government policy and adoption within local government, public services, education, and the private sector. While overall the transition to OSS has been successful, there have been a few setbacks." From the article: "Not all of the organisations involved in the open source proof of concept trials have proceeded with open source adoption, however. In particular, the Central Scotland Police dealt a blow to open source supporters in August 2005 when it abandoned Linux and Sun's StarOffice in favour of Windows. The police force moved to StarOffice in 2000 and later adopted Linux for a new Area Command office at Falkirk. It also worked with IBM Corp to adopt Linux for a server-based document management system to meet Freedom of Information Act requirements, claiming savings of between 20,000 and 30,000 pounds ($36,000 and $54,000) over five years on hardware costs."
Spoken like someone from the UK (Score:1, Troll)
Shouldn't this read "How is the UK doing with Open Source Adoption?"
Or else, "What is the UK doing for Open Source Adoption?"
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It's Slashdribble.
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It might not be grammatically correct, but it is a common colloquialism in many areas of Britain.
It's certainly not US english, right?
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In UK english the title means "Do you have enough open source left?"
Which is totally different.
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I actually find 'for' to be more natural than 'with' in this instance. It's not going anything WITH the open source adoption... It's DOING the open source adoption.
Maybe 'as far as' or 'concerning' would be better.
Oh heck, maybe there's a bajillion ways to
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Amazingly enough, there's no law, physical or legal, which requires people to read your mind to understand what you mean. You're free to make mistakes, though listening to yourself as if you were the person you're communicating with helps keep you in line.
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Adopt the right product for the job (Score:2, Informative)
In my experience (middleware), many of the open source products do the job well but require massive investments of time and expertise to get of the ground and maintain, whereas the comercial solutions come with proper support, documentation and decent GUIs. The question that needs to be asked is does it cost more for the licences or more for
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If the government us
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Wait, scratch the "kind of like" from that last sentence fragment.
University of Liverpool (Score:2)
c++ elitism? (Score:3, Insightful)
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However, I would also argue that at least a basic understanding of C/C++ is also needed by grad
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Python is a much better language. It isn't a slow bloated monstrosity with a development environment that takes at least a gigabyte of RAM to run reasonably. Additionally, you don't have a compile, edit, link cycle to worry about. It's easy to prototype out your function on the command line before putting it into your code.
Java is a big mistake. I liked it once, but I've grown to loathe it and its stupid runtime environment. It's the most overhyped piece of garbage in the IT industry today. It will b
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The change is beginning - I know of at least one university that teaches its MSc students on machines running Fedora (since I helped introduce it into the labs) and I know of co
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I've started Eclipse and tried to use it. Even without having anything loaded the thing's VM footprint is 700M. So don't try to tell me you can get away with less than a gigabyte of memory if you want it to run reasonably.
And don't even get me started about Java's complete inability to do reasonable lambda expressions of having to go through the clunky reflection API to even think about treating classes as objects. I can even get that kind of power in C++, which is a significantly older language with to
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Java is excellent for large apps that need to be solid and need to be maintainable, enterprise apps basically, but even on the desktop it's perfectly capable of running as well as standard C/C++ apps. Eclipse is actually far more responsive for me than Mozilla's apps
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Well, here's the output of top on my system.
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This is true. I use emacs and ipython as my Python IDE. They work fairly well, but don't look nearly as slick as Eclipse. There is IDLE [python.org] and PyPE [sourceforge.net], but they are a lot less ambitious (or, from another perspective, overfeatured and bloated) than Eclipse. But, I wouldn't generally use them as I've rarely found that sort of development tool useful. And I've made a go of using them for a long time too because everybody else has raved so much about them. I've come to the conclusion that they prefer an illusio [cryptonomicon.com]
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Personally I agree that Java is the best language for learning OOP. Unfortunately, OOP is just not the best thing to learn. CS is about teaching the whole of Computer Science, and OOP is a small part of CS. It's a real shame that Java doesn't support any programming paradigms other than OOP oth
University researchers tend not to use Windows (Score:2, Informative)
My friends working in the arts or social sciences do tend to use Windows--although they're using it for writing up, as opposed to c
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hardware or software costs? (Score:2)
Are those savings seperate to the savings by using Linux or inclusive? All that seems to indicate is that their new server system means they need less hardware and save money. The Linux side of things is irrelevant if the reason they're saving money is mostly
UK Free Software Network (UKFSN) (Score:3, Informative)
The UK also has some initiatives such as the UK Free Software Network (UKFSN) [ukfsn.org] which seem to be doing really well. It's a zero-support ISP which donates profits to open source projects.
Love matters most in adoption (Score:1, Funny)
Linux in Industry (Score:2)
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Almost all my company's infrastructure is running on Sun boxes. Paid for, full support, so maybe not quite as "free" as my Gentoo desktop, but probably a lot cheaper than a Windows server, and certainly more reliable than the few Windows machines we do have.
It doesn't have to be free to be reliable, secure and not-Windows.
Depends... (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest hurdle is the users, I tried letting people have a go with a Linux distro, OpenOffice etc and the first thing they said was "Where's publisher?" and "How do I use this digital camera (with locked drivers for Windows)" etc etc. Far too many problems. Plus we have a fair few Access databases.
For those who only needed Word, Excel and a few other things I tried giving them OpenOffice but they just moaned and asked for the "Standard Microsoft" products.
For a while we've been using Mozilla Thunderbird, but as more and more people are needing access to their email remotely, and IMAP is far from brilliant in said client (folders refusing to delete properly and other such niggles) I think Exchange and Outlook are not far off the horizon. Simply because, dare I say it on Slashdot, Micrsoft software is generally the easiest to use in the eyes of the non-computer-literate. [With the exception of Office 2007 beta as it stands, that's bloody awful to use]
I'd love to go OSS and I'm sure in an organisation with slightly more intelligent staff it wouldn't be a problem. But this lot at my place are *very* easily confused. A shining example would be one guy today, who panicked that his box was "going beebeebeebeebeebeebeep". I went to his desk and found a ring binder sat on the keyboard. Another one, a little while ago but still there, was desparately trying to shove a floppy in a Zip drive. These are the kind of people I have to deal with, so any less-than-minor change would have them baffled for months. Trying to tell them how to do all the various workarounds and procedures usually needed in OSS software to do various things that are point-and-click in Windows is out of the question really.
The only OSS app which *has* gone down well is Firefox, perhaps because it's got a very familiar/intuitive interface for ex-IE users, it's feature-complete (I've seen so many OSS alternatives that can only be described as half-finished) and generally very well written. The staff love not having to deal with malware, popups and self-installers, even if it does take an age to load in comparison with IE.
Who knows, maybe the situation will improve eventually... but right now the demand is for "Standard Microsoft" software and giving them alternatives just tends to upset them.
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Big community, lots of development,little adoption (Score:1)
Not Very Well at all.
#!/usr/bin/python
foo='ck'
bar='it'
progress = "fu" + foo + "ing " + "sh" + bar
print progress
I have been trying to think of famous British open source people/projects. Here is what I have come up with so far:
Xen
Mark Shuttleworth (sort of - has a British passport now and wanders around London sometimes).
Tim Berners Lee, WWW
Rob Hartill, Apache
Simon Tatham, Putty
Ian Jackson,ex-Deb
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I wouldn't say famous, but four more British open source projects/people are:
JamVM - a free open source Java Virtual Machine, written and maintained by Robert Lougher
Squashfs - a compressed filesystem for Linux. This is the most widely used filesystem for LiveCDs, used by most major Linux distributions. It is also extensively used in embedded systems (i.e. most Linux based wireless route
But... (Score:1)