The UK government is widely perceived as lagging behind other European governments in the deployment of Linux and open source software.
While other European cities such as Munich, Bergen and Vienna are partway through high-profile implementations of Linux, the UK has failed to proffer similar case study material. In fact, right now the UK's public sector is probably best known in open source circles for the embarrassing U-turn perpetrated by Newham Council. It has been alleged that the council feigned interest in Linux just to get a better price from Microsoft.
But following the publication of a pro-open source report by the Office of Government Commerce, things started to look up, although some of this headway was dented with the announcement the following week that Microsoft had won a £500m contract to supply software to the NHS.
But despite the conspicuous lack of a flagship Linux implementation, at the grassroots level some government-funded organisations are making significant investments in open source technology. OpenAdvantage, created in January this year with £4.5m of government funding, aims to promote open source and support those companies using, developing or selling services around it - bringing together technology customers and open source suppliers.
ZDNet UK spoke to Paul Cooper, the assistant director at OpenAdvantage, to find out more about the organisation -- such as why their server room is the centrepiece of the office, and how open source has helped a million-pound business create a "Fisher Price" user-friendly email system.
How did OpenAdvantage come into being?
I've been involved with open source for 10 years. Scott [Thompson, the director of OpenAdvantage] and I came up with idea about two and a half years ago when we were working at the University of Central England. We worked on both internal and external projects.
Every time Scott and I went to a new client, we would spend the first hour explaining what open source is. One day, before a client meeting, we discussed how good it would be if another organisation could explain open source, so that individual businesses which were selling open source solutions didn't have to.
We then developed the idea and wrote a proposal. We thought, "We can't do this on our own -- we have to build partnerships." We had a look around the UK and the only other people who were thinking along the same lines were the National Business to Business Centre in Warwick University, which was using open source software, and the National Computing Centre (NCC) in Manchester, which had published a paper on open source. In this paper they called for some of the ideas we had in our proposal: for example, a centre where people could get impartial, vendor-neutral advice about open source.
We teamed up with those two institutions. We are the main partners -- there are nine staff here, three at Warwick and one at the NCC. We opened our office here in January this year.
What are the aims of the project?
Our key aims are to inform, advise and assist people in whatever aspect of open source - whether they are using, developing or commercialising it. The service is free for organisations in the West Midlands area -- from Stoke on Trent down to Hereford. We are the first in UK and one of the first in Europe.
We are very focused on IT SMEs -- there won't be widespread adoption of open source unless companies can go to their local supplier and get support for open source. We aim to help independent consultants, jobbing programmers and SMEs.
Basically, we're the open source dating agency for the West Midlands -- we bring together people who provide something in the open source area, with those who want something.
