Reg readers have spoken: 93% back move away from Microsoft in UK public sector Register readers are backing a shift away from Microsoft software as a default across the UK public sector after the government confirmed it expects to spend £9 billion with the software giant over five years. microsoft Faced with £40B budget hole, UK public sector commits £9B to Microsoft READ MORE Official estimates …
"Rather than a panacea," Creese added, "open source can create unforeseen risks of lock-in and incompatibilities across increasingly integrated systems. As the links between different public service organisations become more crucial, incompatibility creates all manner of problems."
Isn't that the wrong way around?
Closed-source software like Microsoft produces is what creates risks of lock-in. They deliberately make their software tightly integrated, to increase that lock-in.
Open-source generally follows open standards, and can be modified/forked/replaced if needed.
Links between different organisations require open, well-documented standards for APIs and file formats. Allowing much more flexibility in system choice, and no need to "increasingly integrate" everything into one monolithic nightmare.
By all means allow public sector organisations use Microsoft, but require that they use open document formats. And ban the use of Excel completely!!
I think the whole thing is beyond tech anyway. With Trump holding a tariff gun to our heads over how we negotiate with big tech, this is very far from being a ring fenced debate. "Let our american tech companies charge you through the nose and dictate how you operate, or I'll hike tariffs and wreck your industry."
You've just described the lock-in that is part of the deal with monopoly closed-source software with proprietary file formats.
If we had the ability to ditch Microsoft, we'd have a MUCH stronger hand when doing all types of deals with Trump, trade or otherwise.
"We'd love to continue spending $billions a year with Microsoft, but not if you're going to put tariffs on our trade with the USA. We have alternatives!"
What are you saying, haven't Microsoft embraced the Open Document Format? It's true they stuffed the standards committee with stooges so that they could get through their demands for opaque binary blobs, and their actual implementation of the Open Document Standard is sketchy at best. But MS Word will open a .odt just fine... And then proceed to corrupt its contents.
By all means allow public sector organisations use Microsoft, but require that they use open document formats.
This is so steamingly obvious. It's not a question of who supplies or maintains your software, it's a matter of which standards it uses. Anything which has no publicly and freely available data protocol is just a mechanism to hold your data hostage.
And ban the use of Excel completely!!
Oh, I don't know, it has its uses. Just stop people using it as a bloody database engine.
"I think a spreadsheet's biggest problem is that if you have a spreadsheet, everything looks like a spreadsheet problem..."
If you know how to set up a spreadsheet and have something that's really more of a database thing, but simple, it can be faster to go with what you know. I have a DB of electronic components I have on hand since I don't have the space to keep everything in racks of drawer bins. When I first came up with a system that let me put things wherever they would fit, I had it on a spreadsheet. With a database, I can create lists by part number and location as well has being able to search my description keywords and have a list of parts that I may not have a part number for. I can also have a photo field and categories in a hierarchy. Using a spreadsheet would be frustrating.
I sometimes will do peening with a framing hammer if I'm too lazy to dig out my peening hammers. It's not the best tool for the job, but it doesn't always matter.
working in the NHS, so many departments have whole systems built off excel. from frontends to databases to sheets that are used to create reports via macros that have been handed down through generations of employees.
so many of these have no notes or comments, no one knows exactly how they work but there's often someone who's been handed down the knowledge of how to wrangle them when things go wrong.
replacing all of these would be decades worth of work for the NHS, and with doubtful benefits.
"replacing all of these would be decades worth of work for the NHS, and with doubtful benefits."
If it will be decades, they should start right away.
Kluged things tend to become more and more of boat anchor as time goes on. If one is using M$ macros, the system is locked to M$ and their continued support for all of the features of the macro. As the person that originally set it has likely left and later people in the position have less and less insight into the internal workings, if a change is needed it's a massive slog. It may not be M$ that has made a change, but some new reporting requirement that requires a change. For me, writing a new report out of a database is pretty straight forward. I also find it easier to export data into other formats for external processing.
For a long time I have felt that the standards for software used in the public sector should be about interchange formats and what data is retrievable for how long.
Having consistent standards allows people to choose the tools they want and know they'll be able to talk to one another, it also allows SMEs to work to those standards and create or combine tools that can be sold to multiple organisations in the confidence that they as long as they are interchange compliant everyone will be getting what they need from them.
And luckily LibreOffice will choke if there's a space or newline in the ascii part of said xml files. Just like xml processors don't.
The fact this basic failure hasn't been fixed is a clue how much investment the EU and UK actually put into FOSS the first time around. Trying to implement Microsoft's document layout system, the bastard child of decades of inserting weird edge cases as part of anti competitive arms races was always going to be doomed to failure though.
"Rather than a panacea," Creese added, "open source can create unforeseen risks of lock-in and incompatibilities across increasingly integrated systems. As the links between different public service organisations become more crucial, incompatibility creates all manner of problems."
Then standardise on a data interchange standard rather than "standardising" on the latest version of Microsoft %whatever%.
The biggest issue with *nix systems is that high level specialists aren't easy or cheap to come by, however since Canonical who makes Ubuntu is a British company it doesn't seem unreasonable to standardise on their software and pay them to maintain additional high level experts to provide emergency support.
Non Microsoft/non document file format thing for a second - this argument has been raging in health for years now between interoperability standards and data standards. The one camp wants a standardised data model across all systems across the board (so everything is interoperable out of the box because it's all one mahoosive schema), the other side are more flexible about data models inside systems/services being for a purpose and data exchange being interoperable standards.
"Rather than a panacea," Creese added, "open source can create unforeseen risks of lock-in and incompatibilities across increasingly integrated systems. As the links between different public service organisations become more crucial, incompatibility creates all manner of problems."
That is because some proprietary s/ware vendors create churn by tweaking the file formats & protocols thus deliberately creating incompatibilities. They do this so force customers to upgrade to the latest version of their s/ware so that they can work with those who are already using the latest version. Some will remove support for old standards.
So he is quite right in claiming that it creates lock-in ... it is lock in to previous versions of proprietary s/ware and open source s/ware - it locks out the latest versions.
This is a great example of how it is possible to mislead by telling the truth.
>This is a great example of how it is possible to mislead by telling the truth.
It is even more true than you allude to ie. opensource can create unforeseen risks...
Take two examples the Internet and the C language.
With the Internet we have been hitting problems achieving the relatively simple objective of replacing IPv4 with IPv6.
With open source, mostly being written in C (for reasons relating to Unix and Linux adoption), we are also hitting all sorts of problems as some try to move to RUST etc.
However, if we step back, we can see that these problems are simply manifestations of the maintenance overhead, only with open source and Open Systems, it is much harder to withdraw support for the old and simply impose the new.
Not sure if I implied they were “upgrades” they are just significant changes to the established ecosystems.
I mentioned Rust because an implicit assumption many make, including CodeAI is a mono culture of C; move to Rust and re-use of C code patterns becomes problematic. So we will have a period when the Rust CodeAI will have little to draw upon, requiring humans to fill in the gaps…
>” By all means allow public sector organisations use Microsoft, but require that they use open document formats.”
Replace “Microsoft” with any vendor of choice and that was basically the message of he Open Systems movement of the 1980s. MAP/TOP/GOSIP didn’t specify products they specified file formats and interconnection (ie. Networking Standards, In expectation vendors would produce products that supported such Standards.
You would abstain from voting away the entire modern lacklustre writing style of El Reg over one stray apostrophe?
I applaud the clearly British insanity that implies, but we must have a stiff upper lip and vote for what is right. We will fight them on the internet and we must never surrender.
We cannot be defeated by disappearing up our own ruddy arses through our own fastidiousness. That is what they want. That is how they win. It is madness man.
Make some tea, calm down...straighten your gilet, finish your crossword if you must...perhaps load up your pipe with a little rough shag...then gather yourself to vote sir. We must pull together. Your country needs you.
It's on the imgur post, you can't post polls directly on El Reg. America only loves democracy if it goes their way...just like business deals (see HP) if something does not pan out the way they want it to, they go to great lengths to prevent it or legally overturn it.
37 Brits have proven smart enough to find it. Not one American has found their way through. It warms my heart. My fellow Brits, you are still the greatest in the World.
The poll is not only highlighting the desire to return El Reg to its roots, it is also demonstrating why it should!
On rare occasions I think "Why can I up-vote a comment only once?" So have one on me instead.
With American web sites I can just about tolerate their somewhat cavalier attitude to the English language, it is after all an American site. But why in God's name does El Reg have to inflict "International English" on us?
International English, my arse. It's American English with a fancy name.
I blame Noah Webster.
I also agree. And that 'true costs' argument by Jos is cobblers, especially as I've experienced Microsoft pull the rug from underneath us multiple times, leading to unplanned expenditure and increased recurring costs.
It's narrow-sighted 'IT leaders' like him that take the p155 when folk like myself are having to deal with fixing these issues by trying to mitigate proprietary vendor lock-in, only to get overruled by some C-suite numpty who thinks they are an expert, all because they've opened Microsoft Excel a few times, but hasn't got a scooby doo when it comes to software system integrations.
Also I doubt this pole view is new. Unless there was one 10 years back saying "69% (fnnaaarr) of Reg readers back a move to Microsoft cloud services in the UK public sector", with the comments section ably refereed by the Moderatrix.
But I really doubt it.
With Windows Recall constantly screenshotting what a user sees, including credit card numbers and passwords, to feed the AI machine and Microsoft being on the record that data sovereignty doesn't exist with Microsoft platforms, I don't think that anyone in government or business that handles sensitive or private data should be using Microsoft products.
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It's just a thought but if the Government was to promote FOSS within the Civil Service and Government organizations, why don't they encourage schools and collages to use and teach classes on FOSS office applications? They would make a saving in license costs, while turning out a steady stream of people who could use alternative M365 software.
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Oh, you mean like the risk of a 1100% increase in yearly subscription costs ?
My take on this is that civil servants are simply dumb and lazy. Open source requires some investigating an researching for the best solution. And it may not always be up to par with commercial offerings (but neither are these commercial offerings up to snuff what the customer wants or requires, we've just grown accustomed to swallowing whatever Big Tech provides us with) but it will result in much greater freedom to partition you IT the way YOU want it, not what Big Tech demands in order for them to make the most profit.
Let's start with moving all councils and HM government desktops over to LInux MInt by default, regardless of the consequences and see what sticks.
It's a hot take...but misguided. I don't detect sarcasm so am pretty sure you actually think this which is quite sad.
Who is the customer you are referring to here? The users or the IT function?
Are you suggesting people who don't understand complex software are dumb and lazy? I am afraid the world is destined to thoroughly disappoint you.
A poll of El Reg readers isn't exactly representative.
I mean, you've polled people who are experts in tech. I bet hardly any of those polled have degrees in the arts, or are best mates with rich CEOs.
How many went to Eton, for example?
It's hardly fair polling people who are experts in the subject, and value critical thinking.
I mean, how many of your readers were fooled into thinking Brexit was a good idea? How many of them believe the crap politicians come out with?
Yeah, polling people who know what they're talking about is bound to get a skewed result like that.
Next time, do better. Dave down the pub knows a thing or two.
I suspect a large majority of responders have no idea how IT works in the public sector where experienced IT admins are rarer than rocking horse sh*t amd the whole thing is held together with chewing gum and bailing wire. Most of these guys are just happy that they can keep the lights on and don't have the expertize or time to handle major IT projects, and those that do have the expertize quickly move on to jobs in the public sector that pay more.
microsoft at BEST is just a copy of stuff they nicked, generalists.
in 2025 there is NO excuse for anyone working on an office to use the "i'm not technical" excuse & resize to pivot to something else. ideally a european software distributor.
#Eurostack is a thing & that £9 billion would be FAR better spent encouraging Uk & European companies.
Looking at china india russia cock waving this week... you have to remember that it is the WEST that trained & paid for all of that overc the last 20-30 years. with some ALONE shovelling $550 billion over s decade to build the Chinese electronics industry.
Even now short sighted CEOs & the useless Government & moronic civil service offshore jobs, allow unlimited visas to "bring in talent" & have devastated the UK IT industry.
As i've said many times there is literally no reason to do a STEM degree anymore, your job will get offshored. 300,000 jobs sent every year, even at minimum wage, that's £1 billion in lost tax & NI! since MANY of those jobs are now ex high paying IT jobs, that's easily £3-4 BILLION in lost PAYE taxes EACH YEAR!
But expecting the UK government & UK industry to invest in the UK & UK/EU firms would be asking too much
This survey confirms my belief that The Register readers are out of touch with the macro world of IT and perhaps are the sandal-wearing, basement dwelling nerds we're portrayed to be!
Nothing is perfect and Microsoft costs money upfront. Fact. However, the compatibility of Microsoft's operating systems (in particular) is staggering when it comes to software, hardware and middleware support. This applies to both front-end and back-end systems. There's no way that Open Source can compete in this area and this massively increases the total cost of ownership. If (for example) an application was written in .NET, an old version (even an ancient version) will have a very strong chance of working with a brand new Microsoft OS as long as the .NET version is still available.
Yes, as we move into the SaaS era more and more applications are browser-based and this will reduce the dependencies a little (primarily for end-users). Similarly, as API support becomes more prevalent as older applications get phased out it will also reduce the reliance on interconnected systems using all sorts of exotic interfaces. However, I find it inconceivable that the public sector would gain any benefits from moving from Microsoft as their primary OS / Office Suite vendor in the next decade. If the commercial sector isn't doing it (at scale), then there's absolutely no evidence that those cost savings exist.
"Rather than a panacea," Creese added, "open source can create unforeseen risks of lock-in and incompatibilities across increasingly integrated systems. As the links between different public service organisations become more crucial, incompatibility creates all manner of problems."
The FUD is strong with this one.
How about those mostly useless ERP systems that are making millions for a bloke called Larry on the public purse? That's what closed source consultant driven software looks like. I think open source would have to try pretty damn hard to be worse.
Secondly, public sector systems have, are, and will be a farce. The reason is that everybody wants to do it their own special way and nobody wants to relinquish control of their little bit of the puzzle. The fact that we even have semi-functional systems is almost a miracle.
Thirdly, open source means open documents and specifications so stuff can be made to work because you know what this does and wants and you know what that does and wants. Yes, work will need done to join all the dots, but it's better than those consultants who charge a month's minimum wage per day and yet, somehow, still seem to fail to deliver.
Of course this will require the government to consider giving the work to real programmers and techies rather than writing specifications so onerous that "the usual companies" are the only ones that get the contracts, get taxpayer millions, and little changes.
The reality is that the public sector refuses to be able to afford the IT staff it needs in the first place.
Run databases, need a DBA? Ha! that's a band 6 post following AfC, guess what, DBAs get paid way more than that.
Developers, kidding right? don't even pay above the threshold for visas
Support staff, well lets promote a load of helpdesk staff because we can't afford the MCSE accredited tech staff.
Wait what, Redhat offer support, great lets spend the 9bn on them instead of Microsoft.
Has the UK gov forgotten that without Alan Turing and Sir Tim Berners-lee, there would be no computers or the internet? It's all just zeros and ones at the end of the day. Close source means the standard isn't published and its harder to decypher. This worshiping of US big tech is alarmingly naive coming from a country with serious OG credentials.
... £1.9 billion will be spent every year...
...and the cost of migration, retraining, software recertification, etc ad nauseum?
Add on the annual running support costs of the allegedly "free" stuff, and I'd be gobsmacked if there were any savings at all in a timescale shy of 20 years, with the slight problem that the majority of the cost would need to be spent up front to do it at all.
Yes, I have had cause to look at this on a large scale before. We renewed the MS contract...
“....support costs of the allegedly "free” stuff”
And therein is the problem!
I’ve had this conversation more than once with clients and it tends to go like this;
Client : This cost from Microsoft for ‘email’ etc is a lot, and what’s this nonsense about Windows 10 and having to replace all of our PCs by next month?
Me : The cost for ‘email’ is your Office/Microsoft 365 subscription, I have told you before this is what you pay for using MS products.
Client : Is there anyway of not paying?
Me : Well, you could not use Windows and the Office suite, there are, technically ‘free’ alternatives
Client : Free, you say, sounds good, yes, let’s go with that. But tell me if something goes wrong, who do I call for support?
Me : Ah, right it’s free for a reason, because it's supported by volunteers and/or doing your own research.
Client : Ah that doesn’t sound good, so if I go with your solution, I’m relying on ‘helpful volunteers’, in the event of any issues. If I lose data, who do I set my lawyers on?
Me : Ah no, there are version which offer paid-for support.
Client : So it’s not ‘free’ then.
Me : Well no, what do you expect. But it will be cheaper!
Client : Go away, I’ll stick with Microsoft, at least I know what I can expect and am getting!
