[Fsfe-uk] Re: UK Government Report: "Open Source - The UK Opportunity"

[Rodger Etz-Brown]

I have given a presentation in front of the head of the IT directorate
at the DTI in 2000.

Aim was to explain the idea of Free Software, the changes this will
bring to the S/W industry and what this means for customers.

The presentation took two hours in which all DTI participants showed
great interest in the matter. They were especially interested to hear
about the commercial effects this has to 'their clients', i.e. S/W
companies and companies using proprietary S/W.

They were furthermore interested to here what effect the widespread use of FS
would have to the economy overall.

The DTI seemed to hear about Free Software for the first time in greater
detail at the presentation.

I initiated the meeting as Managing Director of ID-PRO UK, which soon
afterwards folded due to the collapse of ID-PRO AG in Germany. We were
supposed to have a follow-up meeting where we would provide the DTI with
more information.

The DTI is more interested to hear from associations that represent
serveral companies rather than from a single company as they fear they
would get biased information.

We also had a contact to a member of the House of Commons. That person
was interested to do some lobbying for us. The first step would have
been to report to an unoficial commision about Free Software. The
audience would have been politicians and company owners / managers.

I am happy to provide you guys with the details of the DTI folks I have
been talking to. Please mail me off the list.

For the political lobbying I won't be able to give out the information
as the whole business is run by 'old-shool-ties'. We just managed to get in
due to a good friend of ours that occasionally goes to visit the Blairs
during their hols and watches security people playing football in their
red undies :)

Tada,
REB

P.S.: Excuse my spelling and the the last paragraph. I just got up ;)

On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 04:21:38PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> I've just been given a link to "UK fails to make the most of open source" at
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23653.html by a colleague here at
> Luminas. Does anyone have further information on the report "Open Source -
> The UK Opportunity" mentioned in it?  Was anyone here consulted for it?
> 
> How can we best respond to this in particular?  Further discussion on the
> FSFE-UK list, please.
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> -- 
> MJR ,----------------------------------------------------
>     | Q. Do you need a net-based application developing, 
>     |    or advice and training about web technology?
>     | A. I suggest you try http://www.luminas.co.uk/
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