Open Source action in UK government

I've been reading the revised Open Source, Open Standards and ReUse: Government Action Plan - it's surprising (and heartening) to see this has existed in one form or another since as far back as 2004. The key changes for this version are:

  • suppliers have to show evidence they've considered open source options - hopefully this will be more than a quick trawl through S...Continue reading

  • Chalk and cheese – the difficulty of analysing open source options

    David Fishman of Lucid Imagination has blogged on how open source search is treated by the analyst community (you can even use his links to get hold of some of the reports mentioned for the usual price of your contact details). We can add to his list a report from the Real Story Group<...Continue reading

    How not to make the same mistake twice

    We've been aware that some FAST customers will be considering migration for a while now - but Autonomy have finally caught up. However, if you migrate from one closed source solution to another, how can you guarantee that the same sort of events that have led to the current situation won't happen again? With open source, there's no vendor lock-in, a wide choice of companies to assist you with develo...Continue reading

    Questions to ask your search vendor

    #1 - How does it work? You'll probably get as many different answers to this as there are vendors - but you may not get the whole truth. Bear in mind that a lot of search engines share what theoretical ideas they apply. An engine might use a vector-space or probabilistic models for ordering results, for example. Most will create an Continue reading

    Flax partners with Lucid Imagination

    We're very happy to announce that we've been selected as an Authorized Partner by Lucid Imagination, the commercial company for Lucene and Solr. You can read the press release as a PDF here. Apache Lucene and Solr, available as open source software from the Apache Software Foundation, are powerful, scalable, reliable and fully-fea...Continue reading

    The Times they are a-changing….

    News International have announced they will be charging for access to their Times and Sunday Times newspaper websites within a few months. At the same time we have the announcement that the Independent newspaper is to be bought by a Russian oligarch, and may end up as a free publication. This divergence of business models is interesting, but what concerns us at Flax is how ...Continue reading