The workshop I went to recently and the ICT Champions in general (“Website Under Development” – release early, anyone?) seem to be funded by public and charity money. As I mentioned, the worst thing was all the needless promotion of certain companies’ products, so why are they promoting private products instead of being neutral and open?
That’s bad for Britain, bad for the competing products that are co-produced by the Voluntary and Community Sector and bad for the VCS workers because it trains them in single-tool methods instead of transferable skills. Let the private sector pay for their own adverts! Why can’t we stop making this mistake?
Which brings me to the other problem with that ICT advice: well-meaning common-sector businesses like ours can’t update it autonomously, for two reasons:
- All the texts I saw were under various Non-Commercial and No Derivative licences which make them hazardous or unusable to IT support businesses.
- Particularly on Free and Open Source Software, the advice is at best misleading and unhelpful. This is very frustrating: based on our private work and success in explaining things, I’m sure we could do better, but for various reasons, no-one is paying for us to publish that. Instead, someone’s paying to publish statements like “There’s no such thing as ‘open source'” written by someone from an association that includes Microsoft and Oracle.
Again, why is public and charity money paying for the private sector’s marketing? Why is it published under blocking copyright terms, scattering broken glass across the path just built? Where can we get funding to publish our explanations?
“There’s no such thing as open source”
You were joking, weren’t you? I can imagine consultants on the public pound spouting all kinds of FUD, (fear uncertainty and doubt) and I agree, such despicable marketing should be done at the vendors expense.
Can I guess that this is the software patent protection argument taken to its illogical extreme?
Oh I wish I were joking!
The quote makes a little more sense in context (I’ll send you a link privately if you want – I don’t want to link such a terrible page here, for various reasons) as part of an argument that there are many different types of Free and Open Source Software, but that’s true of software generally, so it looks like a pretty blatent attempt by large private-sector opponents of FOSS to confuse buyers with hyperbole.
Not sure where the NCVO / NAVCA confusion came in (not that its mentioned in this blog but MJ I know you have mentioned it on Twitter relating to this post). The champions for ICT in the regional is a Capacitybuilders grant funded programme co-ordinated by NAVCA. Previously this initiative was administered at part of the NCVO controlled ICT Hub.
Our mission is to champion best and appropriate use of technology in the voluntary and community sector / third sector. For all the right reasons this is frequently the use of free and open source software, but to be impartial we have suggested organisations look at other options – such as CTX (www.ctxchange.org.uk)
I would hope no-one at this event quoted “there’s no such thing as open source”, very misleading and very wrong! Please let me know where you’ve read this.
A guide to FOSS produced under the ICT Hub branding and written from a user point of view is at
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4029563/1-FOSS-Introduction
This was part of a large and well funded piece of work undertaken by Midlands Open Source, NCC and others (part of the ICT Hub) into FOSS – so there has been support to produce this advice.
Those attending the workshops took away a USB memory stick which included lots of FOSS software.
The champions for ICT programme that I am co-ordinating in NAVCA has been funded by public money through Capacitybuilders to help supporter organisations make best use of their technology – I firmly believe in this and will provide whatever guidance they need to see this happens.
Just to point out that the NCVO ICT event is not connected to the ICT champions, or to NAVCA – its good to see an event taking place for VCS orgs, but it would be better if it had a better provider balance I certainally agree!
@watfordgap – I’ll send you a link to that article. No-one quoted the “no such thing as open source” but the website which contains it was heavily promoted at the event and was itself funded by public money.
I know the NCVO isn’t connected to the current ICT champions, or to NAVCA. My comments about it on the other site was in reply to a suggestion that I should be criticising NCVO for the same private-company-promotion problem. Maybe I should, but I won’t in this article.
I tried the link to the guide to FOSS produced under the ICT Hub branding and got a message that “Scribd requires Javascript” – any plans to publish it on an accessible website?
When back in the office (Javascript usually eats laptop batteries, so I can understand why it’s not available on my mobile phone), I enabled Javascript and I got some dodgy adverts (including “Solar Stock Pick” which looks like a pump-and-dump and “Artery Clearing Secret”), the usual Google Analytics 3-cookies-on-each-click effect and a message “Hello, you have an old version of Adobe Flash Player. To use iPaper (and lots of other stuff on the web) you need to get the latest Flash player.” I’m not an Adobe customer and don’t want to be. If it’s so well-funded why does it need adverts? I’ve been criticised elsewhere for the adverts on this site, but we get no outside funding for it.
Fortunately, the login allows openID and there’s a plain text download, so I could read the guide. Why is this made so difficult?
The actual guide is mostly fine, but early on seems to suggest that FOSS is only made by retro hobbyists, Linux means a return to the command-line and other common myths. I’m really not sure that’s a good way to promote it.
Firefox is used as an example of FOSS, which most of the versions people download aren’t – Icecat and Iceweasel may be better examples, although not as famous.
Most of the other examples are pretty good, but again it’s a bit disappointing that the failed Open Source Initiative gets such a strong promotion instead of the more VCS-like Free Software Foundations. That happened at the NAVCA event too. Which brings me to a more general question: why do the VCS sector so often hide the FSF and its GNU project? This guide to FOSS even mentioned Stephen Fry earlier, who made a film which you can watch at http://gnu.org/fry
This stuff gets produced and then left. I’m sure a bit of crowdsourcing (or peer review) could help it, but actual FOSS third-sector providers only seem to get shown it after publication, after the funding has run out, when it can’t even be bugfixed if needed, let alone simply enhanced. Should grant-funding require both peer review and a second edition?
MJ said “Should grant-funding require both peer review and a second edition?”
Even better than a second edition in my view: grants should fund organizations that have a sustainable business plan to maintain the resource for its useful life. (That plan could simply involve a Creative Commons license, plus handing over stewardship of the completed project to a business or charity with a proven track record.)
I am glad to read that I am not the only one getting sick of paternalistic initiatives to create resources with great potential, but that are out of date the day they are published.
I’m reluctant to suggest requiring “a sustainable business plan” because that often encourages user fees and other things which are harmful to general public benefit.
Also, note that the linked ICT Hub guide is under a Creative Commons license. It’s just one that doubly prohibits TTLLP from changing it.