Sharing

From OpenEGov

London Borough of Newham are hosting the crm academy, which is looking into Custom Relationship Management systems for local government. They are working together with NDL, who recently issued a press release which says, in part:

For those that had already installed CRM programmes, Oracle was the leading    
supplier, with Northgate a close second - clearly leaving behind some of the 
traditional market leaders such as Seibel [sic] and Unisys. Many councils 
were also planning to build systems in-house, believing they could provide 
better functionality by creating programmes themselves. Whilst 90% of those   
that had used recognised suppliers still felt they were left with a lot of 
work to do after the implementation was supposedly complete.

This is symptomatic. The default assumption is that programmes will be closed source and proprietary. When these are inevitably not adapted to the exact circumstances of the council using them, each council builds a separate in-house version. Not only does this leave other councils having to repeat the same process, the result is inevitably not totally satisfactory, since the process is a one-off one of paying for a 'product' from a supplier, rather than the continuous improvement model of free software.

The licensing statement for access to the CRM academies products says:

Conditions of Use

These CRM products are provided for use within local authorities and the   
public sector free of charge and ‘as is’ and ‘as seen’.
Access is granted to commercial suppliers where they are currently tendering   
for or engaged in providing CRM products or services to a local authority.
These CRM products may not be re-used or re-sold for profit or commercial  
gain, nor used as the basis for any consultancy service. 

Why? This is like a hobbyist software license from the 80s. Why not make this a free license?

In any case, what is actually behind this license page is not (in the current phase) software, but documents: guidelines for procurement, etc. Some of this is in pure corporate speak; other documents seem more practical, but any idea of treating freedom as an aspect of software to be considered during procurement is notably absent [yuk - rewrite and verify!!]

why on earth is dotP not free software?