Government takes on proprietary software lobby in open standards battle

[Dos_Box]

From Computerweekly.com: Government takes on proprietary software lobby in open standards battle

 

To quote the article:

 

The UK government wants to push through a policy of using open standards when purchasing technology, but continues to face barriers posed by vested interests keen to maintain the dominance of proprietary systems.

 

This also came as a bit of an eyebrow raiser:

 

Though proprietary standards are the desired exception they have managed to become the norm in software implementations. Their market power was the reason both the current and previous governments gave for introducing open standards policies. It is also the reason they both had trouble carrying those policies out, as was demonstrated last year by Bristol City Council's failure to choose anything other than a Microsoft software infrastructure, and the Cabinet Office's discovery that 70% of all software licences bought by UK government departments were Oracle.

 

70%! Thats a lot of licences! After reading the article I do get the impression there is a hell of a scrap going on in the background though.

Edited April 20, 2012 by Dos_Box