Topic: Tory open-source claims 'misguided'

[sam]

The Conservative party is mistaken in calling for the government to begin using open-source software, it has been claimed.

According to Richard Kirk, vice president and European general manager at Fortify Software, there are several security problems inherent with using open source.

'The Conservatives have accused the government of failing to capitalise on open-source software, despite reports from government agencies that have recommended its usage,' he said.

'Our own research, however, has concluded that open-source software exposes users to significant and unnecessary business risk, as the security is often overlooked, making users more vulnerable to security breaches.'

The Conservatives had based their position on a study commissioned by the party which was conducted by Dr Mark Thompson of Cambridge University.

It suggested that the government could slash IT budgets by using open-source solutions.

The government has been criticised in recent times for letting some of its large-scale IT projects go over budget and fall behind schedule.

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=conWebDoc.24384

[Rik]

The Govt is quite capable of losing data without any help - I don't think it would make that much difference, tbh.

[sam]

and open source would make things more secure.. especially since their workers wouldn't have a f***ing clue how todo anything... good old education system that teaches people microsoft and microsoft only.

[Rik]

That was always a big mistake, how to help make a monopoly in several easy lessons.

[sam]

picking up on this... http://blog.eracc.com/2009/02/10/linux-versus-the-microsoft-trained-brain-syndrome/

Recent articles I have read by people complaining about how things on Linux do not work like they do on Microsoft led me to coin the phrase Microsoft Trained Brain Syndrome (MTBS). The problem is that people who have lived, worked, and played in a homogeneous Microsoft computing paradigm are lost and confused when they encounter a different paradigm. These people have only seen the flawed Microsoft ideology for how computing systems should work and so have a difficult time with more elegant systems based on Unix. They see the Linux system with its’ own paradigm and ideology and try to force it into the only paradigm they know, which is Microsoft’s. This will always cause the user problems.