26 Feb 2007
In an effort to promote open standards and open-source technology across the UK, the National Open Centre (NOC) will throw open its doors today at an official launch event at the Houses of Parliament.
The NOC is supported by IT organisations such as IBM and the National Computing Centre, as well as public sector representatives including Birmingham City Council. The aim is to develop policy, identify opportunities and foster innovation around open standards and open-source use.
Further reading
The objectives will be supported by an NOC web site that will point visitors to existing resources, and an activity centre. The group will also host an events programme to debate issues such as the impact of shared web services on end-user licences, and whether the public sector is “suffering from procurement policies which militate against [open source and open standards]”.
Before accepting Noc's conceited claim as a 'landmark unique programme' or the 'national focal point' for the debate around open source, it's worth looking at the track record for each founding partner:
1)NCC - retired their Open Source Lab in 2006 in favour of a Microsoft / Dell sponsored Proof-of-Concept laboratory (see press release at http://tinyurl.com/35c73a).
2)Birmingham City Council - initially pursued ambitious plans for an 'Open Desktop' in Birmingham's Central Library. Despite the best intentions of library staff, their plans were scuppered by the amateurism of the Council's IT department. BCC spent £500,000 on deploying OpenOffice and Firefox on a handful of Windows desktops (see http://tinyurl.com/2smsm2).
3)OpenAdvantage - funded by the same regional development agency behind Noc, OpenAdvantage's impact on the adoption of open source in the region has been limited to distributing branded merchandise at Linux World and running Joomla! courses.
4)University of Central England - a curious institution largely responsible for forming OpenAdvantage.
5)Digital Birmingham - an initiative set up by Birmingham City Council and BT that brings with it no obvious open source expertise.
6)Open Forum Europe - tellingly not referred to in the publicity around Noc but known by many industry insiders as the key driving force behind the scheme. Backed by numerous proprietary software vendors, Open Forum Europe first came to prominence in 2003 when they signed an industry resolution calling for the EU to allow software patents. After claiming to represent the open source community's view on the subject they incurred the public wrath of Bruce Perens (http://tinyurl.com/b3gc) and Michael Tienmann (http://tinyurl.com/2t4f3j). Since then Open Forum Europe have secured public funding for projects such as the Open Source Academy (failed) and ToFE (failing).
The motivations for Noc are opaque and can be only speculated. But with the rather lacklustre launch of ToFE's 'Certified Open' scheme still a vague memory I, for one, don't believe in coincidences. Perhaps Noc is to Certified Open what the OEM is to Microsoft Vista - a mechanism for forcing an unnecessary but potentially very profitable 'upgrade' on an unsuspecting public?
Posted by: dogStar 27 Feb 2007
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