74 lines
4.2 KiB
Plaintext
74 lines
4.2 KiB
Plaintext
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Episode: 795
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Title: HPR0795: John Uren on FLOSS in the UK Civil Service
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0795/hpr0795.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-08 02:39:24
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---
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.
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Hello ladies and gentlemen my name is Kanthalan and we're coming to you live to tape from
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Ogkamp 11 and I'm here with John Euren and he's going to talk to us about the UK Civil
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Service and open source software how it uses it and how it's hopefully going to do some
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more contributing.
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Okay, excellent.
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We were talking last night and it seemed very interesting to me that the UK Civil Service
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doesn't jump to mind as one of the top open source contributors can tell us a little
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bit about that.
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Well it's not one of the main open source contributors mainly because we have issues
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around Crown Copyright so any work we do we really have Crown Copyright releasing issues
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and in my particular organisation very simply the software isn't really used by the general
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public.
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Okay.
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What sort of software do you use?
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What sort of software do I use?
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Well apart from the looks and windows at work a lot of homebrew, well a lot of
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creative software that's created internally within the organisation.
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Particularly in relation to open source do you mentioned Etherpad last night?
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Yes.
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I am minister of my works Etherpad server which has been an interesting project to get
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around all the various hurdles and specifically the enormous bureaucracy which does exist.
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It can be quite bureaucratic, even just getting a box to put it on, it's quite bureaucratic.
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Okay, and what do you see as the main benefits for open source in the civil service?
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One of them was cost because we don't have enormous amounts of money within the civil
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service or UK government, we're going through spending reviews like right and centre.
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Another one is the fact that you can just take it apart and hack it for your own needs
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rather than taking something off the shelf which you then work out is not that good.
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So I've done that with Etherpad in work, I've basically reconfigured it so it's better
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for work and can be used by the people in work as a better tool for collaborating.
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And Etherpad was one of the projects that Google purchased and then released back to the
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community.
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Yeah.
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Do you find a lot of people are using that?
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How are your changes accepted by the wider community?
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My changes are sort of easily accepted, I've only sort of put one change back up stream
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so far.
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Mainly because we had issues releasing back stuff.
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So I'm still having to work out more of a formal method of taking stuff that I do at work
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and having them release back into the community.
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That's one of the reasons I've actually had work out to work out the community's reaction
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to the UK civil service, basically contributing stuff back.
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Fantastic.
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And is there a lot of people involved in open source in your organisation?
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There are quite a few people.
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They tend to do it in their not at work time but at home time.
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So they'll do it as individuals at home.
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So I know one guy is a Debian developer and there's quite a few sort of Linux sys admins
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and general geeks, I work around a lot of mathematicians, there's a huge amount of geeks
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there.
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But they all do it as individuals at home rather than through work and we're at the point
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where we're going, right, we need to do this as work rather than at home.
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And did you know what have you done to encourage that?
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We've created an open source software week to discuss the various issues around it to
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get more open source adoption, basically top to bottom, to try and sort of calm down
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fears from seniors that we can't get support for it or we can, or it'll contain holes.
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The general fears are people have using open source.
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And also to try and start discussing, at least within work, things like releasing stuff
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back, which licenses to use because there's a multitude of licenses that we could use.
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Sorting out, as I said before, the crown copyright issue and things like that.
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Okay, fantastic.
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Do you have anything else to add?
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To be honest, thank you very much for coming and I hope you enjoyed the show.
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All right, thank you.
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Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio for more information on the show and how
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to contribute to your own shows visit Hacker Public Radio dot org.
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