"Being Becta insiders is what matters, insiders who have no track record in open source, do not even give it a passing mention on their website, and until yesterday were completely unknown to anyone in either the industry or community. Just handed a quarter-of-a-million pounds, Becta's friends are now responsible for the direction open source takes in British schools, entirely removed from the UK open-source community and industry."

More at ZDNet.

It certainly smells of political sleaze and cronyism to me.

Sounds like sour grapes to me and pulling the "public sector cronyism" card in retaliation.

From my reading of the complete story and other articles on the subject I think the cronyism comments are very reasonable and most likely correct. I cannot see how comments, by recognized Open Source bodies, being sour grapes when the "winning ???" company has never been heard of by anyone in the Open Source Software world.

Cheers. John.

AussieJohn,

There are no credible evidence to support the "sleaze" claim, IMO.

I guess I recognize it easier because I had years of involvement in politics where I saw such sleaze and cronyism all around me. It sickened me so much that I withdrew from all political activity after about 12 years. Especially around a certain Prime Minister whose name started with W. I like to think that I have lost my naivety in that regard at least.

John.

John, may I hazard a guess that you experience is of the Australian politics? The story is concerning the British Public Sector, which I have worked in and have relations who work in senior positions. Here, so called political sleaze is not as much of a problem as the media like to make us think.

Political sleeze reminds me of David Mellor!

Toe-sucking anyone?!?

Maybe that's because so much of it goes unreported! Yes I agree that the media does tend to over-hype these situations, non the less, it does exist and should rightly be exposed and stamped out. Enough of the 'Old Boys' network already.