And in response to my post about the UK accepting open source software, Mark replies,
Amazingly enough, the Irish government is in the pocket of Sun, MS & IBM.
They turned down MS’s offer to build the government portal sites, and turned to Sun to do it with iPlanet on Solaris.
MS sit in the front end, and AS/400′s & S/390′s do all the heavy lifting in the back. Some one in there is canny enough to get it kinda right, he/she just isn’t the one running the entire techie show. We need a national IT tsar, someone who isn’t a clueless idiot, but not someone smart owned by one of the vendors. Ideally, he or she could take a big stick to eircom and other luddites to get them moving on the infrastructure we really need.
