UK Gov't Reneges On Open Source Promise For Cloudstore 2.0 48
DerekduPreez writes "The UK government has finally unveiled the second iteration of its Cloudstore after a number of delays, and has reneged on its pledge to make version 2.0 open source. Cloudstore is an online catalogue that the public sector can use to procure cloud services provided by suppliers signed up to the G-Cloud framework. The first version of the Cloudstore was unveiled in February. Computerworld UK spoke to former G-Cloud director Chris Chant shortly after the first release, who was at the time also overseeing the second iteration. He stated during his interview that Cloudstore 2.0 would be go live in April and it would be built using open source code. However, following weeks of delays, the Cabinet Office has now confirmed that the second iteration also isn't open source."
expect nothing less from the Nasty Party (Score:5, Informative)
The post-1970s Tories are nothing more and nothing less than a representative for the interests of a few very rich businessmen. Despite their waffle about the free market and the evils of statism, they're very much Italian corporatists, and everything they do ends up increasing the flow of Treasury cash to their friends. Whenever a Tory policy is announced, there is only one question you need to ask to understand it: which big business makes money from this?
People who voted for them on a deficit reduction strategy are stupid: the recession was not caused by any individual government, although it was certainly caused by Western Thatcherite policy which Blair adopted and which Cameron continues to adopt. Their "savings" are merely ways of leaving the poor destitute and desperate to provide cheap labour, while they continue to find new ways of wasting money on expensive contracts - see article.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, and just when you think you might get a chance to stop flip flopping between two parties the bulk of the UKians vote against a change from first past the post and thus maintain the status quo.
Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party (Score:5, Insightful)
How many of those voting do you think actually bothered to check the facts of what they were voting for, rather than just listening to what the media told them? Big media is run by the same people, they want to keep the status quo because it benefits them.
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Unfortunately the truth is worse than that. I did much to explain to my friends and family why AV is a better system. They still almost all voted to keep FPTP. And the reason that they were uninformed didn't apply.
The trouble is this. The vast majority of people are conservative with a small c. Even the ones that are liberal or left. They think things like "better the devil you know", and "we don't want to be out of the frying pan, into the fire". They take on board all the possible things that might be neg
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The Tory party aren't the lesser of two evils; they're in the top three or four of about 20 evils (EDL and BNP being obvious winners in that list). Why not vote Green, UKIP or Independent? Or, alternatively, the SNP/Plaid Cymru?
The only wasted votes are those that go to parties that don't need them.
Re: (Score:3)
In simple terms, the Green Party, UKIP, Plaid Cmyru and by extension many Independent candidates are single-issue puppets. They are the worst of all that you could elect to form a government as they just wouldn't know what to do beyond their campaign issue of environmentalism/devolution/secession/UK exiting the EU/whatever. I had an independent candidate in my constituency for nine
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Clearly you have not bothered to read the Green Party or Plaid Cmyru manifestos or find out almost anything about them. In fact let's just look at the headline points from the Green Party's policy page [greenparty.org.uk]:
Fair is worth fighting for
The banking system
Health and the NHS
Pensions
Housing
Jobs and a living wage
Transport
Young people
Notice that they don't even mention environmentalism on that list, which is what you claim is their single issue. I picked the Greens at random, but even UKIP have policies on most things.
If
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I'll give you a hint, seeing as you are so hell-bent on being obtuse. The Green Party is either a party with environmentalism or legalising marijuana at its core. If they need to bloody well spell that out in their manifesto then the problems are more severe than I thought.
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Not quite. The Green parties started out back in the 1970s with an initial focus of environmentalism, but rapidly expanded to include other issues. As Wikipedia explains,
"Green politics is a political ideology that aims for the creation of an ecologically sustainable society rooted in environmentalism, social liberalism, and grassroots democracy. ...In addition to democracy and ecological issues, green politics is concerned with civil liberties, social justice, nonviolence and tends to support social progressivism. ...as the 'Green' ideology expanded, there also came into separate existence green movements on the political right in the form of green conservatism and eco-capitalism."
The US branch in California does a much better job than the UK Green site does of showing the key values that the parties share by phrasing the goals like questions [cagreens.org]. A few from the site:
How can we
... encourage people to commit themselves to lifestyles that promote their own health?
... ensure that representatives will be fully accountable to the people who elected them?
... have a decentralized, democratic society with our political, economic and social institutions locating power on the smallest scale (closest to home) that is efficient and practical?
... restrict the size and concentrated power of corporations without discouraging superior efficiency or technological innovation?
... induce our government and other institutions to practice fiscal responsibility?
... reclaim our country's finest shared ideals: the dignity of the individual, democratic participation, and liberty and justice for all?
... induce people and institutions to think in terms of the long range future, and not just in terms of their short range selfish interest?
I don't know which issues the UK Greens are prioritizing, but aside from regional issues, the different groups do tend to be very alike, and I know that
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I'm afraid you're just showing your ignorance of the Green Party. They're not single issue. They have a full range of policies across the board.
If rather than accuracy you just want to ignorantly stereotype, you could say that Tories and Labour are single-issue puppets. Their issues being: money and unions. That's how stupid your perception of the Green party is.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately, the only viable alternative is Labour, who are just as bad as the Tories... They are all just out to line their own pockets, and thanks to big business control of the media there will never be sufficient widespread publicity for any alternatives.
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Never say never. It used to seem like a two party system of the Tories and the Whigs. The Labour party was only formed in 1900. And by 1924 they were the ruling party.
And big media's power is waning. Newspaper circulation has been shrinking for decade. People watch less TV than they used to. People get much more of their information from the internet. And that's far more democratised. Anybody can have their own blog or site.
Now more than ever in my lifetime, there seems to be change in the air.
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At least it's not labour in power.
Whenever a Labour policy was announced the only question that came to mind was "How much is this going to cost me?" and it was usually quite a lot.
And while your bleating is cute, they had over a decade of the best economic conditions I've seen in my lifetime, and still managed to screw up the economy. And that's all before you take into account their abhorrent social policies - ASBOs, CCTV, ID cards, just to name a few.
I'm fine with you not voting for the Tory party (I ne
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they had over a decade of the best economic conditions I've seen in my lifetime, and still managed to screw up the economy.
This is common faulty thinking. When it's the party that you don't support:
1) If the economy goes well, it just happened and the party were lucky to be in power at that time.
2) If the economy goes badly, then it's that party's fault.
The extent to which it is obvious you can see right now. The fucked up economy of the end of the Labour term and through the Tory term is worldwide. You have to be a cretin of enormous proportions to say a UK party screwed the economy.
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Sorry, no, you can't credit Labour with the good years and then pass off that bad years as a worldwide phenomenon, when both were happening worldwide! My faulty thinking?
They rode the worldwide financial waves, and while doing it they expanded the public sector massively and ran up huge amounts of debt, all seemingly in anticipation that Gordon Christ had ended boom and bust forever. They were shown up to be incompetents that left the country in a financially dangerous state. So in answer to your facile poi
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Sorry, no, you can't credit Labour with the good years and then pass off that bad years as a worldwide phenomenon, when both were happening worldwide! My faulty thinking?
Yes, your faulty thinking for a second time. I didn't do that. Only you made that mistake. (in reverse.)
You'd have to be a cretin of enormous proportions to not see that the specifics of the British economy as it now stands are entirely the fault of the retards on the red side of the house.
And there you are, you're still doing it. Cretin.
Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party (Score:5, Insightful)
The Tories are not the government, their are in a coalition with the Lib Dems. The massive debt was run up by an incompetent Labour government who ran up a massive deficit and sold off all our gold reserve for pennies. The coalition inherited a complete mess just as the financial world was sliding into a global recession. All of which doesn't have much to do with open sourcing or not some app they developed. From the article:
"We had said that we wanted to move to an open source solution but it has not been possible to do so in this version of CloudStore,” said a Cabinet Office spokesperson.
“We are still committed to considering a full open source solution as part of this ongoing development and are hopeful we can include API, product rating and reviews in future iterations too.”
They are not the first to want to clean up the code before releasing it OS, eg Google did the same with Honeycomb. The British have always been staggeringly incompetent when it comes to software projects. Mind-blowingly bad. Billions wasted. It's always been this way no matter who has been in government.
Phillip.
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Mind-blowingly bad. Billions wasted. It's always been this way no matter who has been in government.
And if the best story they Computerworld can come up with is, 'software ships in May, when they promised April', then things are going a lot better than usual.
Re:expect nothing less from the Nasty Party (Score:5, Informative)
"The British have always been staggeringly incompetent when it comes to software projects."
Would you mind altering that to the British Government? Or the large multinational corps that run the projects for them?
There's a lot of good software comes out of the UK, and a lot of very competent engineering departments. The fact that the government uses incompetents and gives them an unlimited budgets should not be used to draw conclusions about the entire country.
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Yes I meant the British government. CSA [theregister.co.uk] springs to mind wasting £539M, along with the Fire Services [guardian.co.uk] failure costing another £500M. Apparently the last Labour government managed to waste £26bn [independent.co.uk] in botched projects and 7/10 UK government projects are failures [zdnetasia.com].
The Brits in the private sector are quite excellent. However they are rarely used with government contracts outsourced abroad (usually EDS).
Phillip.
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I guess you didn't notice the subtle wording.
What they're saying is they'll definitely think about considering it - they're hoping everyone will assume they mean they're committed to open sourcing it but in fact what they're hiding is they mean exactly the opposite.
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The massive debt was run up by an incompetent Labour government who ran up a massive deficit and sold off all our gold reserve for pennies.
It's amazing how Tory supporters manage to trot that one out without remembering that their own party sold off council houses, British Gas, Rolls Royce, Ferranti, National Express, Sealink, Cable & Wireless and many more "for pennies". Tories sold off far more of the public wealth at stupidly low prices than Labour did.
The coalition inherited a complete mess just as the financial world was sliding into a global recession.
Absolutely they did. It's not their fault that we are in recession. They aren't able to control the economy. So why are they trying to? Austerity can't create growth. It just makes stag
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Austerity is a tool to move power and money into corporate hands. This is why the IMF always insists on it when they offer emergency loans.
They embark on a systematic program of fucking up public services until they collapse, then corporations can pick up the slack and start turning the screw.
Truth? (Score:4, Funny)
Honestly it is like politicians never tell the truth any more, oh wait! :)
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renege (Score:1, Informative)
renege /ri'neg/
Verb:
Go back on a promise, undertaking, or contract.
Re:renege (Score:4, Funny)
Informative
Adj:
Universally known, but copy-pasted from a dictionary for no apparent reason.
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I do understand that this is Slashdot and everyone here is American, but still...
Given that my English is of a high standard and that I had to look up this word means that many people reading this article will have to do the same. So why not be nice and save them the effort.
WTF is open source in this context? (Score:3, Insightful)
Two months to dramatically change a product from a 'close-source' to 'open-source' model, whatever that means, in the context of an application that no one will use outside of government work, means someone had incredibly unrealistic expectations and is not in touch with real development times.
What does it mean in this context though, open-source? That they were using linux for the backend? Or that they are releasing the code to this project? Either way it seems silly to care about this, there are better (both "free" and non-free) options for your own "cloudstore" than a government built package, assuming youre looking for a document and knowledge repository.
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If you think that merely having a job (which isn't the case for all computer geeks) makes a person immune to having their vote bought or to rhetoric, you need to get out a lot more...
Nothings changed (Score:1)
Typical my Government, making promises, then finding out they cant make much money from open source, so we will have a proprietary system instead, just so some corporation can make money from the data and the installation. Just wait 4 years and see who becomes a board member of the supply and administration companies.
Nothings changed just the same, the people at the top feathering their nests.
the real story (Score:3, Insightful)
what they said:
"We had said that we wanted to move to an open source solution but it has not been possible to do so in this version of CloudStore,” said a Cabinet Office spokesperson.
the truth:
"We said it would be open source but it was inconvenient for us and we have no legal obligation to actually follow through on any promises we made to the public," said a rat.
WTH is CloudStore ? (Score:5, Insightful)
And what the hell is the G-Cloud ?
I'm sorely tired of all these 'marketing' terms... I work at the pointy end of IT - y'know rack servers, networking, routers and all that... To me the 'Cloud' is just a box or boxes in a rack running Xen.
Cloudstore sounds like yet another one of those soundbite services dreamed up by some slick suited tan and teeth marketing type.
I had someone arguing with me the other day - they wanted to use "The Cloud" for something so I said sure I'll sort out some space on a server in a rack and they were like "No we don't want a server in a rack" we want "The Cloud"...
So I sorted out some space on a server in a rack, gave em the login details and told em "There's your cloud"....
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And what the hell is the G-Cloud ?
Since "cloud" is a marketing term that contains no meaning, you can make press releases easier to understand if you substitute it with 'stuff".
UK home office talks agout G--stuff frameworks and StuffStore. It immediatly looks that something not worth a news
Headline (Score:1)
Saw this comming (Score:1)