March 10, 2007 ... Firefoxski, Comrade Osborne.

It’s official! Software aficionado, Conservative MP and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has used the Firefox browser, and he likes it. So it’s all systems go in the Open-Source backed quest to save £600-million pounds of the UK government’s ’s IT budget by foregoing any new Microsoft licenses.

This does make a reasonable amount of sense. Open-Source software is quality software in many instances, and any Open-Source operating systems are essentially versions of UNIX, which has been around since the 1970s and has repeatedly proved itself in highly demanding situations.

But there are problems. Backwards compatibility with databases, electronic documents created in Microsoft Office, and so on, will be a nightmare to administrate. Internet services, such as Internet conferencing, will not function because the software and websites are exclusively designed to work with Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows. Remedies are possible.

Some problems can be overcome by running a multiplicity of additional emulation software, which can easily make for fearsomely difficult and expensive administration. Others will require an ongoing commitment and collaboration with third-party software companies such as Adobe. And there would have to be a UK_IT_Project Open-Source repository for all the Open-Source software, similar to Red Hat or Suse-Novell, for example, which would have to be incompatible with any other Open-Source repository, for security reasons, of course :-) Government has spectacularly failed in the past with initiatives much less ambitious than this, and have incurred billions of pounds of write offs.

Open-Source is good, and can work well in many situations. But to think that it will ultimately save any money is hugely moot.

Firefox is as good as it is because it had to compete head-to-head with Internet Explorer 6, and now 7, on many Microsoft Windows installations. But it did not have to suffer any competition with alternative Open-Source browsers on Open-Source installations. Many Open-Source users are enthusiasts and part-time developers who expect to be challenged for fun, and will persevere until a resolution is discovered. Mere mortals will accept no disruption to expectations honed by the use of Windows, irrespective of its critics’ criticisms.

Without proper competitive pressure on a free market, there is no incentive to make Open-Source compete with Windows, where it must now compete on the Internet. This is because the competent part-time software developers see no fun in working for nothing, when they can get paid by commercial software companies, and communism goes no further in cyberspace than it did in the iron-curtain world we are supposed to have left behind.