Re: [Fsfe-uk] govt standards development contracted out

[Graham Seaman]

Simon Waters wrote:

> Robin Green wrote:
> |
> | in general the principle of outsourcing technical work to the private
> | sector makes some kind of sense, because public sector employers can 
> have
> | difficulty attracting employees with the range of experience that you
> might find
> | at a good private sector IT provider.
>
> Pay a third party X + Profit + N, so they can pay their staff more (X+N)
> than you pay yours (X), and outsource the interesting new stuff, and
> wonder why your inhouse IT staff are demoralised and leaving in droves.
Yes, but in this case I'm not complaining about the general issue of 
outsourcing
(which is so entrenched it's not going to be reversed in a hurry) but 
about the
idea of giving ownership of the standards to a particular company:

"it will administer and develop a system known as Custodian, which acts 
as a national repository for
local e-government standards" 
(http://www.kablenet.com/kd.nsf/Frontpage/607591EEF0AF6E6080256FC6004283FD?OpenDocument)

How much do you want to bet Custodian will be accessible to approved 
suppliers only on payment of a large fee? That would permanently lock 
all small free software suppliers out of local government contracts. 
This is not just one contract like others, it could be the KEY contract 
which decides all the others. The 'seamless' taxonomy was  going that 
way until it was merged with eGMS; once standards development is 
outsourced it becomes the 'obvious' way to finance it. Imagine if the 
W3C outsourced
its standards development work to a single large company; how much 
chance would there be for free software to survive
in web applications?

> In reality you usually need skilled IT inhouse after the projects are
> finished, my Aunt worked at a hopsital where the inhouse IT staff had no
> idea how the main admin system worked, so every little fault had to
> accumulate till they could justify a 1000GBP for a day of "fixes" from
> the consultancy (Cap Gemini I believe), and these weren't rocket science
> type fixes.
And if the admin system had been open source they could have had a 
chance of looking
for someone cheaper than Cap Gemini to fix it. Making these applications 
closed source
is disastrous for everyone; all government developed apps should be open 
source to
stop this kind of lock-in.

Graham

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