Re: [Fsfe-uk] dotP

[Alex Hudson]

On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 23:04 +0000, Graham Seaman wrote:
> >~£40M (with more to come, I expect) on content management is possibly a
> >trifle expensive, but it's basically BEA Weblogic. 
>
> What? They spent £35m on weblogic? How? And what they've done won't sit 
> on top of anything else?

Apparently so. To what extent it isn't Weblogic, I don't know - I doubt
that they have customised the core or anything, but maybe there is
significant ancilliary software. 

> No, I meant 'why isn't dotP free software'?  Developed with tax money, 
> supposed to be used by as many departments as possible to recoup the 
> expenses, and it's closed source? Why? What do they gain by that? 

Ah, ok. I guess they just didn't consider it. Certainly, if it's built
on Weblogic, releasing what bits they have may or may not be terribly
useful, but they seem to be having problems with take-up based on
feature set/technology which implies that making it free software might
have made it more attractive internally.

> And as for sophistication and government-oriented applications, ins't 
> APLAWS+ supposed to be this?
> Though if  dotP is a league above that, I still don't understand why it 
> can't be free software - is it because they left the copyrights with 
> their outsourced developers?

Who knows. Maybe if someone did the project I outlined looking at the
costs (and maybe the opportunity costs) of the DoTP project, it might be
a good base on which to ask further Parliamentary questions. I'm
guessing that the latter reason is at least part of it:

        http://www.sapient.com/case/eEnvoy.htm

They don't seem like the sort who would participate in free software
projects. 

As for why not APLAWS+ - I don't know. I suspect the non-CMS reasons
would be why (integration into other systems, scalability) but that
would be guessing.

Cheers,

Alex.