[wdmmg-discuss] How much does the UK spend on proprietary software?

Sat Jul 9 14:21:37 UTC 2011

http://openspending.org/dataset/ukdepartments?q=license+and+software

Shows some 75 million GBP total. Is this accurate? Would be nice to
compare with all software purchases but not possible at the moment to
search for expense types that include the word software, only to match
on the literal string, says pudo, given the way the Solr indexes are
arranged.

One thing I found myself wanting to do almost immediately was
something like,

    GROUP BY recipient ORDER BY SUM(amount) DESC

to find out the biggest beneficiaries of software license fees but I
don't think there is a way to do this at the moment.

So let's try another query. There is a well known company that
basically does little but sell software (and support):

http://openspending.org/dataset/ukdepartments?q=microsoft

The total here is 3.7 million GBP. Considering that this doubtless
includes some consulting fees and support contracts this would make
entire the UK government apparatus a surprisingly small client.

I have trouble believing these numbers. 

Can anyone shed any light and/or refine these queries?

-w
-- 
William Waites                <mailto:ww at styx.org>
http://river.styx.org/ww/        <sip:ww at styx.org>
F4B3 39BF E775 CF42 0BAB  3DF0 BE40 A6DF B06F FD45