An article on BBC News immediately caught my eye today, apparently the Shadow Chancellor (George Osborne MP) has made a speech this morning to the Royal Society of Arts in which he proposes that an incoming conservative government would level the playing field for open source software and associated companies, in turn making a saving of around £600 million of the taxpayers money a year. He also cited some examples of other governments around the world (along with several UK local authorities) who have successfully switched to Open Source applications at massive savings to the taxpayers.
It’s very encouraging to be hearing this kind of talk from the Conservatives, in addition to the EDM tabled by Liberal Democrat MP John Pugh in November, there seems so be much more awareness of Open Source within Whitehall. I am also encouraged by the introduction of the National Open Center, a government think-tank for discussion of Open Source use. The Labour government urgently needs to develop a strategy to utilise the awesome power of Open Source software and it’s associated communities.
I decided to write a short note to Mr Osborne to commend him on his, and the Tory party’s incredibly positive attitude towards Open Source, and join him in the hope that the UK can become “the open source leader in Europe”. I also note with some interest that Mr Osborne’s personal website runs on Open Source software, using the Apache web server to serve the pages, and the machine itself running on the CentOS distribution of Linux. So at least he practices what he preaches!
Jonathan
I have finally moved the site and blog over to the WordPress blogging/CMS package, the aim being to allow me much greater flexibility, and make it a lot easier for me to post on the move. The old blog served my needs well for many years, and I would like to thank it’s creator for all the hard work he put in, but since development ceased it’s been more and more prone to attacks and I was having to manually edit code to remove the security holes as I found them, leaving less and less functionality there, until it was almost featureless!
The decision to move came about partly because of problems with my old site and blog, along with the fact that I was getting bored of looking at the same old design after 3(ish) years! Also, I was increasingly finding that the blog was the only section that ever got updated, whilst the rest of the site stayed static, and it didn’t make sense that the only page I kept updated was hidden away! For this reason I chose WordPress as it is primarily a blogging system, so the site now centres around the blog, but it also allows me to create static pages and links as I had on the old site, along with other bits and bobs, so I’m hoping to eventually replicate all the old content onto this new site in the new style.
The WordPress move went very well and thanks to the RSS importer all my old posts were imported and working within seconds, although I only chose to import the last 12 months posts as most of the older ones were a little boring! So far I’m very impressed with the package and have customized it with a fancy theme, and added myself a simple contact form plugin. I will be investigating all of it’s features in the coming weeks. Any comments on the new look and feel are most welcome!
Jonathan
