[csmuk]

That's a silly argument. I'd rather not be pissing an estimated £6400+maintenance up the wall on a project which could have been realised with off the shelf technology.

Just because the organisation uses open-source software doesn't excuse them from public and professional scrutiny.

An MP spending £1645 on a duck house under expenses got a lot more attention than this little bit of waste. Just redressing the balance.

[walshemj]

£6400 wouldn't even pay for the coffee and biscuits on the typical UK government IT project.

[csmuk]

Nearly 4 duck houses though!

[walshemj]

And not even a full week billing for a big 4 management consultant.

[threedaymonk]

Anything can be realised with off-the-shelf technology plus time. Your posited solution further down the page would also have involved work in setting up the pool configuration and switching, so let's not pretend that it comes at zero cost.

[csmuk]

It will come with proportionately less cost initially and over time though which is the issue.

Efficiency is a major problem in government. Government should have a low financial impact on society where possible. A government entering a market with an already solved problem is wasteful at best. If they'd contributed time to Nginx or mod_proxy then they would have a net positive social effect.

But they didn't. They built an inferior product at great cost to the taxpayer.

[urschrei]

A government entering a market with an already solved problem is wasteful at best. If they'd contributed time to Nginx or mod_proxy then they would have a net positive social effect.

Is this some sort of Markov-chained free-market/El-Reg-at-its-most-prolix/libertarian experiment in satire? Well played!

[csmuk]

That made me laugh and I've upvoted you for that, but no, it's serious.

Various governments are already throwing money at Open Document Foundation (France, Germany come to mind) to support LibreOffice so why shouldn't we throw a few quid at nginx/apache?

Or should we go and write our own office suite?