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Glyn Moody's look at all levels of the enterprise open source stack. The blog will look at the organisations that are embracing open source, old and new alike (start-ups welcome), and the communities of users and developers that have formed around them (or not, as the case may be).

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BECTA Rubbishes Almost the Entire UK Open Source Industry

Published 11:24, 13 June 08

I've written a number of times about BECTA, charting its constant flip-flops on open source in schools – sometimes damning it, sometimes driving it. Like me, you've probably been increasingly confused about BECTA's real attitude to free software. Well, I think we know now, following the snubbing of all the most experienced UK open source players in the awarding of a major contract to promote open source in schools.

Here are some of those who have been judged unable to handle this task:

OSS Watch
Schoolforge UK
Open Source Consortium member companies
Sirius, backed by Red Hat, KDE and the Free Software Foundation
Canonical, makers of Ubuntu
INGOTS
The Open Schools Alliance

Well, yes, clearly no one there knows anything about open source. But luckily the winner of the contract, the AlphaPlus consultancy, has buckets of experience - just not in open source, according to its own list of areas of expertise:

AlphaPlus is a team of highly experienced educational consultants with a large and varied portfolio of work in education and training. Our expertise lies in:

vocational and general qualification development
assessment and public examinations
e-assessment, e-learning and e-portfolios.

Great move, BECTA.

For an update, read Abolish BECTA now

Tags: open source