This decision is fragile in the respect to the fact that, many years of habitual purchasing of proprietary software has now got to be unraveled. With most Universities also locked into proprietary platforms : some just having switched from XP to Vista. Nevertheless, the Government is showing genuine sense of purpose in adopting open-standards. With the Government web-site at : https://www.gov.uk/ now switching to or being run on Ubuntu Servers. Then their own procurement site, that is less than a week old : http://gcloud.civilservice.gov.uk/

Here’s some further news : http://www.siriusopensource.com/content/sirius-and-g-cloud-bring-open-source-government

John

Of course, those making the argument in favour of patents that “inventors are entitled to benefit from their ideas” never seem to acknowledge that for genuinely new things, the “inventors” benefit not only by being in a position to deliver something based on a thorough understanding of those ideas, but also by being in the position that allowed them to have those insights in the first place, and thus to be able to go on and have new insights and make new discoveries that others without their experiences would struggle to match. It is all too easy for people to wave away such benefits and demand “solid gold” guarantees of financial reward, but the pursuit of sustainable endeavours by society is one thing that is consistently neglected particularly by policy-makers, and probably leads to huge amounts of waste and economic inefficiency.

If someone decides to cancel or scale back a scientific or technological project to save some money in the short term, the effect can be devastating as knowledge held within the project can be lost and only slowly regained, often from scratch, years later at great additional expense. For clear evidence of this phenomenon, one just has to consider large knowledge-intensive projects in areas such as spaceflight where organisations have been unable to sustain the necessary activities and even maintain internal expertise, let alone expand that expertise significantly. By choosing to undertake a project, it makes sense to sustain that project so that it can keep building on its previous achievements, and it is precisely this mode of operation that gives the true competitive advantage and all the associated benefits, not the pursuit of monopolies to exclude equally sophisticated competitors who are able to gain precisely the same insights through their own activities anyway.

I would personally dispute the legitimacy of some kind of protection on mere “ideas”, and the other thing that is often absent from patent advocacy is how one starts with the notion of merely being able to benefit and ends up granting a monopoly. It is also interesting that public-key cryptography comes up as the “gold standard” of patented technologies. That brings up the unfairness of the effect of patents on those who discover the same things independently, which is apparently what happened with the work that underpins the RSA technologies. Another factor in the popularity of encryption from 2000 onwards might also have something to do with the relaxation of controls around its usage, but that is another story.