How does the UK public sector fare in terms of open source software adoption?
There are some user cases, like the London Underground Oyster card system which is based on open source JBoss for example, but it is true that the UK public sector is behind other European countries in open source software adoption – proprietary software vendors have done a good lobbying job to make sure of that. There is a bit more activity now, and Red Hat has set up a vertical team to focus solely on central and local government and nothing else. We are also working with systems integrators like SIS, CDC and Accenture, who are prime government contractors. Red Hat and 17 other IT vendors have filed a lawsuit against a Swiss government agency for awarding a contract to Microsoft without any public bidding, how is that going? That case is still pending and I am not allowed to comment on progress. What happened was that we said it is just not right that 14m Swiss francs (£8.4m) were awarded to Microsoft without anyone asking if there was an open source alternative out there. We are try
