Simon
Apologies for not replying sooner. I know some progress has been made with regard to CESG and Open Source and will dig out a few links on this. >"Enterprise Architect" civil servants for info. Sounds good. I'll send you details across next week once I'm back in contact with HMG about this. Cheers Mark ________________________________ From: Simon P Smith <[email protected]> To: Mark Elkins <[email protected]> Cc: Mark Elkins <[email protected]>; "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, 28 December 2011, 13:56 Subject: Re: OT: Cabinet Office Ditches Open Standards in IT Mark, On 28/12/11 13:31, Mark Elkins wrote: > >Are you willing to supply some more info about this because as far as I know >HMG still want to use Open Source? For example I am organizing a series of >internal HM Government events for Senior Civil servants on Open Source as >Chair of the BCS Open Source SG (OSSG). The first of which will take place in >February 2012. Therefore your experience sounds like it would be of interest >to the HMG staff I am dealing with setting up these events. In other words >they want to know examples about barriers to adoption of Open Source by HMG. > One of the main issues in this department is the insistence on security accreditation and the push to use CESG approved products. The problem with OS is that you need time and money to submit the product for evaluation and gain some meaningful EAL certification; individual projects cannot afford this. SUSE enterprise and RedHat Enterprise are listed there albeit older versions as those organisations can see some benefit of funding this. I wanted to pilot a system on Ubunutu LTS with SE and use MySQL (or Postgres) instead of MSSQ; you end up spending a great deal of time showing how it can be (1) secure (2) supportable. We are in a laughable position where people will, when faced with a need for a routing MTA in a DMZ, select exchange and have to put in 2 ADs and and exchange box just to provide the MTA; just because "you never get sacked for usign M$". I am interested in your BCS events and if you send me the programme I will forward it to the "Enterprise Architect" civil servants for info. >Just for the record I've looked at this recent statement about Open Standards and feel its more about getting the statement bullet proof as opposed to actually dropping intention to make greater use of (Free and) Open Source. > Or also allowing the vested interests to lobby it more to water it down - perhaps I am cynical. Cheers, Simon -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, second Tuesday 2012-01-10 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:[email protected] How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
