LinuxConf Europe 2007

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Conference Dinner (Sunday)

Duxford Excursion (Monday)

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About Cambridge

Kernel Summit 2007

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Mark Taylor - Open Source Consortium

The State of the Nation - Bringing F/L/OSS to the UK Government

Free Software is making inroads around the world into Government and all areas of Public Administration. But what about the UK? Are we winning? or does the special relationship between the US and the UK extend to software monopolies? Will the Government that made Bill Gates a Knight of the Realm really accept a level playing field and follow its own guidelines?

On the ground, there are increasingly large-and-complex deployments appearing around the country: Moodle taking over half of the VLE market; Grids for learning deploying Free Software web filtering systems to 250,000 shool children; Councils replacing email systems for tens of thousands of users.

Government departments are making their first tentative steps in the Free Software direction. BECTA, for example, is producing papers recommending Schools ignore Vista and Office 2007 whilst also producing papers recommending a closer look at Open Source.

Free Software became a political issue this year with George Osborne and the Conservatives making it policy for their party should they be elected. And one fifth of all MPs expresses their support for Free Software in a phenomenally successful Parliamentary Early Day Motion.

Free Software and anti-trust exploded into mainstream consciousness over the BBC's iPlayer controversy.

Mark will be discussing all this, and more. The discussion will be an insider perspective and will reveal the reality (and more than a little gossip) behind the press headlines.