[ILUG] Government use of OSS

[Gerard Cunningham]

On Thu, 2009-04-23 at 18:45 +0100, Kuda Dube wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Mar 2009 11:09:06 +0000
> Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net> wrote:
> 
> > Anyone got an estimate of how much the government might save
> > if it went over to open source software?
> > 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> An interesting question that I was also about to ask!

Being the government, the answer is probably "nothing".

First off, they'd have to hire an accountancy firm  to do some
consultancy work. Then they'd tweak their requirements and hire a second
crew of consultants to check the new figures. Then they'd advertise for
tenders and support staff, hire people over market rates, and retain all
their old staff anyway but never retrain, so they will spend their time
supporting legacy systems and twiddling their thumbs. The unions would
demand compo for working new systems, since everyone would have to be
retrained (File/Save in OO.o is completely different to File/Save in MS
Office, you see). More consultants would be hired to recommend on
training programmes. FAS executives would head to Disn^H^H^H^H NASA to
see how they do things over there. PR consultants would be contracted to
hire half a dozen dolly birds to pose with the minister in an
cringe-worthy photo-op announcing the new project.

AOnce all that is in place, an incoherent political argument using words
like security, backup procedures, and data safety would be used to
justify buying windows systems anyway 'just in case' and so as not to
piss off Microsoft.
 
And finally, if anything goes wrong and it's a Fiaanna Fáil minister's
fault, Eamonn Ryan will appear on every radio news show in town to take
credit.