{"id":1889,"date":"2009-01-29T23:55:19","date_gmt":"2009-01-29T23:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ewanspence.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/29\/open-source-should-be-used-by-government-say-the-tories\/"},"modified":"2009-01-30T00:15:08","modified_gmt":"2009-01-30T00:15:08","slug":"open-source-should-be-used-by-government-say-the-tories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/01\/open-source-should-be-used-by-government-say-the-tories\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Source Should Be Used By Government, Say The Tories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While I\u2019ve not delved too deeply into this one \u2013 and I doubt I could delve as much as Microsoft\u2019s lawyers will, the proposal (from the Tory party) on IT projects run by the government makes some sensible sounding recommendations.<\/p>\n<p>The first is the headline one, with the report saying that <a href=\"http:\/\/dizzythinks.net\/2009\/01\/toryies-going-agile-on-it-development.html\">projects should make more use of Open Source projects<\/a>. Rather than buying complicated CMS systems for websites and projects, there should be consideration to just use an installation of WordPress; Open Office is a viable alternative; that sort of stuff. Which is all good \u2013 WordPress has stability through millions of users every day which is just as good (if not better) at catching bugs.<\/p>\n<p>The second, that government projects <a href=\"http:\/\/dizzythinks.net\/2009\/01\/toryies-going-agile-on-it-development.html\">deliver more iterations during developments<\/a>, with less of a change between these, also sounds like common sense, but I do worry that it will add more management and paperwork layers.<\/p>\n<p>But no matter \u2013 the idea that Open Source is good enough for the UK Government is a good step for today.<\/p>\n<p>What should we aim for tomorrow?<\/p>\n<p><em>Update<\/em>: Just spotted the Obama Whitehouse and their use of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sitepoint.com\/blogs\/2009\/01\/29\/president-obama-uses-rdfa\/\">Creative Commons Attribution 3.0<\/a> on their web content. Can we try for that?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While I\u2019ve not delved too deeply into this one \u2013 and I doubt I could delve as much as Microsoft\u2019s lawyers will, the proposal (from the Tory party) on IT projects run by the government makes some sensible sounding recommendations. The first is the headline one, with the report saying that projects should make more use of Open Source projects. Rather than buying complicated CMS systems for websites and projects, there should be consideration to just use an installation of WordPress; Open Office is a viable alternative; that sort of stuff. Which is all good \u2013 WordPress has stability through<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[54,52],"tags":[815,816,355,132,814,812,813],"class_list":["post-1889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-web-2point0","tag-agile-development","tag-conservatives","tag-firefox","tag-microsoft","tag-open-office","tag-open-source","tag-thunderbird","comments-off"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58Gl0-ut","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}