HARINGEY Council & IT dependency on one monopolistic provider

SOME 10 years ago, Highgate Councillor Bob Hare—and I also as a Member, with some combined knowledge of computing—met with the-then CEO.

We had sought to encourage the council to consider adopting the UNIX-class Operating System, LINUX.

Since then, LINUX has come on in leaps and bounds along with the free Applications that run on that free, Open Source operating system.

Council "Officers" revel in talking about and publishing the word Strategic.

However if such a long-term approach had begun back then, dividends in the form of IT savings would be felt and be flowing by now. My impression then, was that the-then CEO was focused on the HDV and was lacking in technical knowledge. We two councillors were merely humoured by the then head-of-paid-service.

Like other local authorities, this failing council with it's sprawling, embedded IT Dept. is cosy with, wedded to and dependent on Microsoft Inc. and on their costly M$ site Licence. IMO, we need a new class of IT employee, and not hidebound and hostile to LINUX, change and improvement.

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The high price of M$ lock-in is paid today in other ways:

What we know about the global Microsoft outage

What we know so far about the Microsoft outage

Global Microsoft outage hits schools, doctors and businesses as com...e

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But this council has not, and probably cannot, learn from others, outside or elsewhere.

Once described as Albania in this intensely insular council, some LBH "officers" live in a bunker under a fortress island, and reflect the not-invented-here syndrome.

<— Alan: I've put these descriptions in a single, oven-ready sentence for ease of pick-up ;-)

I fear the Greens may not be able to turn around this top-heavy super-tanker and not everyone wishes them well.

Elsewhere, Europe—especially France—is quietly moving aware from high-dependency on M$. France has a head-start, because of the deep and long experience of their national police force, the oldest in Europe. They switched to secure, robust LINUX years ago.

This rational move may have been nudged by Microsoft which—knowingly and with full intention—deliberately acted to block the MS email account of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Whose email may be next?

This was allegedly in compliance with U.S. sanctions, as punishment for the ICC investigating Israeli officials. MS acted as a wildcat's paw on behalf of the bullying and malevolent Trump Administration. MS later admitted that their testimony to our Parliament, when questioned about this matter, was "inaccurate".

This episode ought to be seen as a warning. The UK needs to reduce its high dependence on the unlimited extra-territorial conduct of both M$ and their host government.

Is our Government or anyone at local government-level paying attention?

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Many people reading this post right now are likely unaware that it is almost certain to be relayed by, dependent on and distributed, via the mature LINUX OS, running on Servers that underpin the vast majority of the entire Internet. For example, former LBH CEO Nick Walkley may not have known that in its early days, the Internet was UNIX and UNIX was the Internet.

Even this council's IT Team may be unlikely to "upgrade" their current Windows 10 network, due to the widely publicised and serious privacy concerns with "11". One day in the future, councils including our own dysfunctional local authority may learn and switch to a UNiX-class system.

Could the Greens make a start on Open Source in our council?

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