BECTA - the track record

While open source experts rage at BECTA's new promotional project, let's remember earlier BECTA actions.

The group, which advises the UK educational sector on IT has had a long and problematic relationship with Microsoft, and seems to have difficulties deciding how to approach open source. To be honest, in one way or another, that's true of most people in the industry.

BECTA is currently being criticised for a program to promote open source in schools which is led by a consultancy with little experience in the field, and which doesn't involve any of open source leaders - a move which has open source promoters howling.

However, let's remember the group is also taking taking a complaint against Microsoft to the EU, although it was earlier criticised for being too closely aligned with Microsoft, to the detriment of open source.

Late in 2007, BECTA commissioned an open source project which was little reported - an interactive whiteboard viewer, with an open format so educational materials can be viewed and shared between schools without high licence costs.

But, as with the schools promotion project, BECTA doesn't seem to be able to please the open source community with its choice of partners - it is using schools IT supplier RM.

Now, RM is a name that no Linux company would choose for itself, and the company's main business is in Windows PCs tailored for education, but it does have the Asus Eee on its books, as well as Linux drivers for a lot of its peripherals, anbd.. that's about it, apart from a lonely mention of open source, on its page of accreditations from BECTA.

That doesn't impress Mark Taylor of the Open Source Consortium. "Which UK Open Source companies were given an opportunity to bid for the work? Or even told about the work?" he asks. "That would be none of them..."

As with the current project, Taylor's complaint is that Becta excluded "real" open source companies, and funnelled £150k "to the same old boys they've been funneling cash to for years, the same ones who got the education IT market into the mess it is in, and giving them their 'Open-wash' credentials at the same time..."

According to BECTA and RM pages, this whiteboard project is due to deliver its file format, on Sourceforge the end of this month.

We'll keep an eye out for it. There's no sign of it yet - though a quick search for "whiteboard" reveals a lot of similar sounding projects. I wonder if any of them could have been used or adapted, instead of starting a new project?