A new slogan and hashtag arrives: #ossplease

On Friday your humble correspondent was avoiding doing paid work and discussing online the glacial pace of the UK public sector’s deployment of open source (news passim) with Mark Taylor of Sirius IT and IT journalist and writer Glyn Moody.

During the discourse, Mark came up with the term ‘OSS Please!’. Glyn then picked it up and after 5 minutes had come up a short blog post on Computer Weekly UK using OSS Please! as a title and promoting the #ossplease hashtag.

We suggest that the UK’s free and open source blogging community adopt this slogan and use it whenever discussing public sector IT, where – let’s face it – lip service has been paid for years to adopting and implementing free and open source software, but very little action has taken place. Let’s not forget that central government’s best estimate (estimate note! HM Government doesn’t even know the exact figure. Ed.) for its annual IT expenditure is £20 bn.

Now all we need is a little action in Whitehall…

Don’t hold your breath! 🙂