Re: [Fsfe-uk] Fwd: [lugmaster] FW: RFI on Open Source from QinetiQ for Office of Government Commerce Contract

[Alex Hudson]

On Fri, 2002-12-20 at 14:33, Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:
> Now is this not intersting.
> Qinetiq (apparently to be pronounced kinetic) seems to be the most round 
> about way to conduct this simple survey and their site is full of interesting 
> info.
> Hopefully some good comes out of this.

QinetiQ (note capitalisation, we wouldn't want to get that wrong ;), our
old friends :) Allow me to advertise my site, and this particular
location: http://www.alexhudson.com/documents/qinetiq_problems.html They
are somewhat well-known to us.

QinetiQ may be well known to some others (even those unaware of my fine
website :) as what is left of DERA, but more recently famous for
incompetantly handling demilitarized ordinance. These are the guys who
loaded 20 anti-tank missile warheads, 8 mines and 8 packages of
miscellaneous other explosives onto a wooden crate for detonation in
controlled under-water explosion.

They left the pallet in the river overnight, and came back the next day
(to blow it up) to find it missing - presumably, having floated off down
the Bristol channel. Because of this and similar 'lost ordance' (having
effectively mined the Brisol mudflats, one of the busiest shipping areas
in Britain) they're now only allowed to blow things up one at a time.

> Maybe AFFS could securely gather data to be presented to government offices, 
> in a down to earth way in the future? 

I'm not sure that would be useful - they're highly unlikely to accept
data from a random organisation, they have to conduct the survey
themselves for the data to be meaningful.

However, it might be an idea for us to contact them with regards to
getting participants for them, especially those who might want to talk
about Free Software rather than OSS. Only by giving positive feedback
that talks about Free Software are they likely to even mention it in
their final report. 

Cheers,

Alex.

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