For those that are wondering, here is Birmingham City Council’s response to the recent near non-story – no doubt there is a little spin and damage control but basically confirms what I’d heard from some people I know: the project isn’t dead, the cost comparisons made weren’t fair, and that BCC is pressing ahead with more FOSS investigations and deployments.
However I still stand by my criticism – if the project had been communicating sensibly and openly with the outside world this would never have happened or at least never got to this level, and quite apart from any possible PR benefits the project would have benefited indirectly.
The article is good for Free Software but this quote is rather disappointing for Gnome:
“At one point, realising that most of the usability issues were attributable to Gnome, which had taken three months to configure, staff ripped out Gnome and replaced it with KDE. The new interface was up and running within a week.”
— Alan Horkan Dec 5, 04:20 pm #
Good point Alan – again questionable journalism, because my understanding of the situation is that it was SuSe’s implementation of Gnome that caused problems – in particular mounting and unmounting USB devices didn’t work smoothly / correctly in Gnome but did in KDE (in SuSe 9.2).
— Paul Cooper Dec 5, 05:07 pm #