UK Conservatives Slammed Over Open Source Stance 281
Golygydd Max writes "The UK government has been criticised by the opposition Conservative (Tory) party for its lack of support for open-source software. Now, according to Techworld, a security company that has examined the Tory plans has come out against the use of open source software, citing the number of security problems inherent in the software. This is a sensitive issue for the UK government, still smarting from the loss of 7m family records from HM Revenue and Customs in 2007. What makes this criticism interesting is that this is an attack on the policies of what will certainly be the next British government — it's unusual for a party to be criticised like this before it comes to office. It's an indication of how IT is going to be a battleground in the future general election."
Hmmmm.... (Score:5, Interesting)
> it's unusual for a party to be criticised like this before it comes to office
Clearly timothy is unfamiliar with UK politics.
See to believe.... (Score:5, Interesting)
While they raise a couple interesting points, my first impression is that they broadly generalize from a small sample set. Specifically, they only look at about 10 Java projects (including Tomcat, Hibernate, and JBoss), and proceed to conclude that the open source community is unresponsive to security threats. Conspicuously absent are any Linux distributions (let alone any *BSD... they have obviously never heard of OpenBSD), OpenOffice, or any tools likely to make it into desktop use for the UK government.
Oh, and the solution to all this apparently is to rely on their company's security auditing services to make sure that your company doesn't have "hidden security holes".... Riiiight....
Re:Anyone for TenDRA? (Score:4, Interesting)
Conflict of interest? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:See to believe.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Just another way to fight... (Score:1, Interesting)
Here in Australia we have two main parties with the balance of power currently held by one or two minority groups. The main parties are virtually indistinguishable from each other except to the highly trained eye. In order to get any legislation through, the party in power has to woo the minority with predictable and hilarious results, such as the Great Australian Firewall.
Australian politics is best summed up by the fact that our most famous Prime Minister held the record for downing a pint and our current was caught in a strip club during a trip to the UN. This would have been a massive scandal, but he claimed he was too drunk to do anything or even know where he was, which only increased his popularity.
We're on much more familiar terms with yachts and boats. Members of parliament are likely to be found fishing from them, comparing engines and encouraging people to 'chuck a sickie' when we win the America's Cup.
A three-way homosexual romp would be considered un-Australian, unless you're in Sydney during Mardi-Gras when I believe it's mandatory.
Could we have the name of Obama's brother's drug-dealer's enforcer? He really couldn't do much of a worse job than any of the clowns we've currently got and at worst, could help 'shift' the balance of power.
Enterprise-level change control (Score:4, Interesting)
I've yet to be in an enterprise which uses enterprise-level change control.
Working for one of the world's largest commercial companies: Closest thing to "source control" was a rigorous automated backup process across network shares.
Working for a small commercial company which sold commercial data processing tools for some of the world's largest commercial companies, and the U.S. Military, and various parts of the U.S. Government: Closest thing to "source control" was laws requiring our code be held in escrow for every release. We routinely released completely untested versions and claimed that it was a re-build of the same sources. Eventually management was convinced to start using source control after asking if anyone had an old copy of a file lying around and I quickly produced it from my local repository. Just before I left, I brought up the issue of segmentation faults and memory corruption, and was told "we can't avoid signalling if we're given bad inputs".
Working for possibly the largest I.T. Company in the world, processing data for the U.S. Government: One person in charge of source control. No branching allowed. Occasionally heard complaints from the guru that people were overwriting each-other's changes. Never heard the word "security" mentioned at any point. Found out I could get a root shell and modify anyone else's source code by passing bad parameters to the reporting system.
Re:"Sells software"? Microsoft Partner! (Score:5, Interesting)
err... less of the FUD please.
First of all, why on earth are you assuming a multi million dollar project is going to be using software supported by some guy called bob?
Rewrite that as using open source software supported by Canonical, Novell, Red Hat or Sun, and all of a sudden Open Source is competing on much more equal footing, and your first argument goes out of the window. After all, you could just have easily bought some closed source software off 'Bob' for your multi-million pound project.
What that, you don't trust Bob's software, and would rather buy from a big company? Funny that.
And do you *really* think Microsoft's EULA disclaimers don't apply to large organizations? Bill Gates didn't get Microsoft to where they are today by the company being dumb. I've seen their volume license terms, and if anything they're *more* restrictive, not less. By all means, quote me a paragraph or two from one of these 'favourible' EULA's that show me I'm wrong, but somehow I don't think that's going to happen.
Re:"Sells software"? Microsoft Partner! (Score:1, Interesting)
OSS lacks QA - show me a OSS project that government is likely to use that has any quality assurances. the big font stating "use at own risk" is a massive turn off for government and rightly so.
That may be true, but part of accepting the risk of OSS is that you also can take an active part in making it better. And in some cases, perhaps more so than by being a beta-tester of a closed commercial software. Provided that a particular OSS is fairly mature in the project cycle, has a fairly large userbase, and has a big enough team of developers who are responsive and attentive to the users, you can get a nice development and feedback loop that rivals or exceeds the QA testing of comparable commercial offerings.
(Even if you can't program worth a gnat's fart nor read source code, nor have money to donate to a project, as an OSS user you can still contribute. You do your part by reporting all unknown bugs, the conditions that cause them, and by discussing particular interface issues and possible fixes or improvements.)
It may not have any assurance of quality, but with the great possibility for refinement in some OSS applications, that doesn't mean there isn't any quality there. More often than not, OSS also has the goal achieving excellence. Some very good OSS applications have made their name and reputation on that aspect.
Re:Hmmmm.... (Score:5, Interesting)
> It's an indication of how IT is going to be a battleground in the future general election.
Indeed Mr AC, you're right.
The UK doesn't have battleground issues in politics like the US, the UK is plagued with football team style voting, most of Yorkshire will vote Labour, most of London will vote Conservatives, the rest of the country will vote one or the other depending with a few Lib Dem pockets (Sheffield, Cambridge) littered in between.
It doesn't matter what their policies are, people don't care about that, the people in Yorkshire (disclaimer: that's where I live) will as always go on about how Thatcher ate their babies in the 70s/80s and so vote Labour, the people in rich areas will go on about how Labour caused a big recession in the 70s and vote Conservatives and the few parts of the country capable of intelligent, dynamic thought will actually vote for the party that actually fits their political hopes best.
People here rarely seem to vote on the merit of a party's politics or agenda but instead based on whatever x party did 20 to 40 years ago and those that weren't around then still vote on what party x did 20 to 40 years ago because their parents have whined to them all their lives about how hard party x made life for them all that time ago.
I think part the problem is that in the UK we get no political education whatsoever, kids grow up without a clue as to what left wing and right wing are, what the different flavours of conservatism for example are, what liberalism and libertarian are and where our parties sit in these areas. We're never taught the importance of voting, or how our vote can effect the outcome of an election, hell most people don't even know what the house of Lords is, they think parliament is one big single chamber of sheer boredom. I find this quite shocking, because whilst I can see the merit in music class, religious education, art and so on I really do think politics is perhaps more important, yet oddly entirely neglected. I could quite happy have lived without the hour a week spent in music class, or the 2 to 3 hours spent on English literature (although language is of course important), I understand some people do want to know this, but it should've been optional whereas I'm not convinced politics should be. We already have history lessons to teach us about our and the world's past so I simply cannot see what is more important about analyzing Wordsworth's Daffodil poem, searching for things that Wordsworth probably never really actually intended us to decide was there as a hidden meaning in the first place to merit a complete national ignorance of how our country is run and how our elected powers work.
I wonder if part the reason there's no will to change this is because both Labour and the Conservatives know that whilst no one has a clue about politics then one or the other is guaranteed to get in via the current football team voting mentality and as such there will be no threat to power being taken away from either of them- when one has had a few years, the other is bound to get in, rinse and repeat.
I think this is the fundamental difference between British and American politics at least, whilst you do get Republicans who always vote Republican and Democrats that always vote Democrat at least you had the likes of Colin Powell endorsing the Democrats because he realised despite them being the opposition, they had the better policies at the end of the day.
Re:Hmmmm.... (Score:1, Interesting)
How does this get modded as 'informative' when, while it does contain some facts, much of it is either factually incorrect or misinformed nostalgia?
Particularly glaring is
most of London will vote Conservatives
London [bbc.co.uk] is the only part of the South-East where Labour have a majority.
I can't even be bothered with the education stuff.
He's from Yorkshire (Score:1, Interesting)
Which means that he doesn't really know what goes on in London.
However, and you omit this reason (which is WHY it got informative mods) and it is 100% true. A HUGE number of people STILL blame anything that's going wrong now with what Mrs Thatcher did. They still say you can't vote Tory because Mrs Thatcher was a Tory. They complain that the problems are all because we've been turned into Americans by Mrs Thatcher.
REALLY weird.
Re:Just another way to fight... (Score:2, Interesting)
I would beg to differ. I do this because I am one of the people advising, well indeed pushing OS within the Conservative Party, hence the AC moniker.
While it may used as a political football there is a good reason also for getting FOSS into Govt. It saves money, which is always good, and if we get Govt to use it, we can get schools to use it and hopefully start to reverse the abysmal decline in coding and computer science in our schools. That's my agenda for pushing it anyway - it's something that the country needs in the short term to save money and that will have real and tangible benefits in the long term in developing and furthering a knowledge based economy
Re:Hmmmm.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Hmmmm.... (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree that FPTP is a bad system, but:
Don't even get me started on European government, which is a fantastic excuse for political parties to push through legislation their electorate don't want because "Europe told me to, mummy!", while conveniently overlooking the way that Europe only considered the issue because the unelected representatives of the country asked them to.
Do you have examples? I'd argue that the UK Government has no trouble pushing through legislation (it has a majority, and it can even force legislation through the Lords with the Parliament Act), without resorting to an excuse. And on the contrary, it's European laws which are the only thing preventing some of the authoritarian laws that the Government has been forcing through (e.g., the recent ruling based on European law that taking DNA and fingerprints of anyone arrested, even if not charged, or found not guilty, is unlawful). It's the European Convention on Human Rights that gives us our only chance of "individual rights and freedoms" that you mention later on.
The Lib Dems seem to think an arbitrarily high level of tax on people who earn more than average is "fair"
Do you have a reference for this policy? Whilst traditionally they said they would increase income tax, now they say they will reduce it ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7615630.stm [bbc.co.uk] ) (incidentally, this change came with the "guy with all the depth of a two-dimensional object"). Given that Labour now plan an even higher rate of tax for high earners ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7745070.stm [bbc.co.uk] ), I'm not sure off-hand that Lib Dem policies are worse here?
So who does that leave for me, and a heavy majority of friends I've talked to on political subjects, who believe in things like individual rights and freedoms, in exchange for individual responsibility; strong laws, but due process to enforce them; small, weak government; low taxes; healthy European relationships for trade, but not all the other stuff that doesn't work at the current time because the nations are too unequal to start with; basically liberal economics, but with controls imposed to prevent companies that have grown large from becoming too powerful either in a certain market or compared to their employees; a basic social safety net, but otherwise letting people earn their own rewards; and other similar policies?
Remember that no one can be expected to match your views 100% - unless you stand yourself. But Lib Dems fit a lot of those I would say, especially with their changed position on tax.
Re:Hmmmm.... (Score:3, Interesting)