MPs get in a funk over open source The Conservative's open source technology strategy may have reached its culmination at a low water mark with the coalition government's renegotiated contract with Computer Sciences Corporation. Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude and chancellor George Osborne presented open source software as the antidote to the Labour government's "catastrophic" NHS National Programme for IT - and a recipe for cheaper and less botched government computing all round - when they launched their technology strategy in 2009. Now four years on, what they have done instead is reconfirm 2bn the 2.9bn contract CSC originally signed under Labour, and dropped that bit of it that would have given them the means to open source the goods. But the original Conservative tech policy was floated on a stream of opportunistic press leaks and anchored with a fishy tie-in with the then Conservative Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee chair Edward Leigh. The coalition government's lack of progress since raises questions about whether it is prepared to put its weight behind the policy. Spin A party insider told Computer Weekly the NHS element of Conservative open source policy was spun to latch on to then current news about NPfIT - the National Programme, Labour's NHSIT disaster. Osborne floated his open source policy on 27 January 2009, the same day the Public Accounts Committee published a report warning NPfIT wouldn't be delivered till 2015, four years late and at a cost of 12.7bn, because of BT and CSC in particular. The