Standards would loosen Microsoft's hold

Several key government officials, including at least one representative of the Cabinet Office, attended last month’s Oasis adoption forum in London. But there is no chance of a major flight from Microsoft in government departments.

IT strategist John Borras, head of the Local e-Government Standards Body and former Oasis board member, points out that there are more than 100,000 desktops in the Revenue and Customs department alone. ‘The cost of replacing that [software] and retraining all those people would be huge.’

He said open source had its place in some back-end systems. ‘But at the desktop level people are reluctant to rely on it because you cannot guarantee its robustness and that if something goes wrong there will be someone there to fix it.’

But neither is the Government flirting with Oasis and open source in order to gain leverage on Microsoft over maintenance fees. Borras pointed out that Britain negotiated a deal on those two years ago.

The use of XML, particularly in a standard form, will in itself open up the software market because it gives complex files the universality of an Ascii text document, which can be created or read by just about any word processor.

Borras said: ‘It is a very good way to get interoperability for everyone at very little cost.’

Which is another way of saying that it will no longer be necessary for everyone to use the same application software. No wonder Microsoft is loath to go too far down the open road.

* Avanquest is to sell Sun’s Staroffice 8, the first commercial suite to support Opendoc, thoughout Europe. Based on open-source code, it runs on the Windows, Linux or Solaris operating systems. It costs £69.99 from here  or retailers and comes with word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing and database modules.