The Times: Tech column - Newham IT/robots.txt files
By David Rowan
IT MAY be just an act of kindness that has led Microsoft to provide expensive independent IT consultants to help an East London local council. Then again, when that council is the borough of Newham - now participating in government trials of non-Microsoft products for the public sector - this could be seen as a cynical means of influencing how taxpayers' money is spent.
Microsoft will not reveal how much it earns from British taxpayers, but the Treasury body that negotiates government licence fees says that it saved £100 million recently by pushing for a better deal. Naturally, Microsoft would be most concerned if the public sector moved to "open source" software - non-proprietary alternatives such as Linux, which are claimed by supporters to offer greater security, reliability and cost-effectiveness than Windows or Office.
Newham, which runs 5,000 networked computers, believes that it could halve its non-capital IT bill if it moved to open source. And with the borough now testing open-source programs as part of a high-profile government pilot, other local authorities are paying close attention.
Microsoft's response has been to offer the borough a "free audit" of its IT systems by sending in independent consultants from Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. They will analyse "on a fair and objective basis" whether open source really does compete favourably with Microsoft products, according to Matt Lambert, Microsoft's director of government affairs. Yet it seems unlikely that OpenOffice or Linux will come out on top after Microsoft has paid the consultants' substantial bill.
"The consultants aren't going to roll over and do as we say, as they have a lot of credibility at stake in terms of impartiality," Lambert insists. But he adds: "Of course, we believe that our products are better."
Newham's IT department is known for its pioneering adoption of smart-card and CCTV technology. If it moved to open source, the impact on other councils would be huge. The underlying politics has not escaped Richard Steel, the borough's IT director. "We didn't ask Microsoft to bring in Cap Gemini, and clearly our job is to make objective judgments about what is presented to us when they issue their report," he says. "I understand the scepticism, but in my position, what would you do if offered free consultancy?"
When Munich's city council was thinking about switching from Microsoft to Linux last spring, Steve Ballmer, the former's chief executive, visited the mayor in person. Yet even the offer of heavy discounts failed to stop Munich going open source, a move said to have benefited taxpayers considerably.
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IF YOU want pages on your website to be ignored by search engines, you can list them in a file, "robots.txt". So let's see which files the White House website wants to stop being returned or archived by Google. Type www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt and we find more than 700 files and directories that include the word "Iraq". Could this be an attempt to stop us comparing earlier White House statements on Saddam Hussein's threat with the situation there today? After all, a few months ago a White House web page claiming that "combat operations in Iraq have ended" was later revised to "major combat operations", a fact disclosed, to administration embarrassment, by the Google "cache". The White House says "it's lubricious" to claim that it is trying to censor past output, but conspiracy theorists, and Democrats, are copying pages just in case.
(The Times, November 3 2003)
IT MAY be just an act of kindness that has led Microsoft to provide expensive independent IT consultants to help an East London local council. Then again, when that council is the borough of Newham - now participating in government trials of non-Microsoft products for the public sector - this could be seen as a cynical means of influencing how taxpayers' money is spent.
Microsoft will not reveal how much it earns from British taxpayers, but the Treasury body that negotiates government licence fees says that it saved £100 million recently by pushing for a better deal. Naturally, Microsoft would be most concerned if the public sector moved to "open source" software - non-proprietary alternatives such as Linux, which are claimed by supporters to offer greater security, reliability and cost-effectiveness than Windows or Office.
Newham, which runs 5,000 networked computers, believes that it could halve its non-capital IT bill if it moved to open source. And with the borough now testing open-source programs as part of a high-profile government pilot, other local authorities are paying close attention.
Microsoft's response has been to offer the borough a "free audit" of its IT systems by sending in independent consultants from Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. They will analyse "on a fair and objective basis" whether open source really does compete favourably with Microsoft products, according to Matt Lambert, Microsoft's director of government affairs. Yet it seems unlikely that OpenOffice or Linux will come out on top after Microsoft has paid the consultants' substantial bill.
"The consultants aren't going to roll over and do as we say, as they have a lot of credibility at stake in terms of impartiality," Lambert insists. But he adds: "Of course, we believe that our products are better."
Newham's IT department is known for its pioneering adoption of smart-card and CCTV technology. If it moved to open source, the impact on other councils would be huge. The underlying politics has not escaped Richard Steel, the borough's IT director. "We didn't ask Microsoft to bring in Cap Gemini, and clearly our job is to make objective judgments about what is presented to us when they issue their report," he says. "I understand the scepticism, but in my position, what would you do if offered free consultancy?"
When Munich's city council was thinking about switching from Microsoft to Linux last spring, Steve Ballmer, the former's chief executive, visited the mayor in person. Yet even the offer of heavy discounts failed to stop Munich going open source, a move said to have benefited taxpayers considerably.
++++
IF YOU want pages on your website to be ignored by search engines, you can list them in a file, "robots.txt". So let's see which files the White House website wants to stop being returned or archived by Google. Type www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt and we find more than 700 files and directories that include the word "Iraq". Could this be an attempt to stop us comparing earlier White House statements on Saddam Hussein's threat with the situation there today? After all, a few months ago a White House web page claiming that "combat operations in Iraq have ended" was later revised to "major combat operations", a fact disclosed, to administration embarrassment, by the Google "cache". The White House says "it's lubricious" to claim that it is trying to censor past output, but conspiracy theorists, and Democrats, are copying pages just in case.
(The Times, November 3 2003)
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