But at least if it was all moved to Linux, there'd be half a chance of public sector IT systems complying with open standards.

At present, neither the HMRC Self Assessment system, nor the (Microsoft) Government Gateway complies with one of the most basic Internet open standards that there is... e-mail addresses!

Despite RFC822 (partly replaced with RFC2822), neither of those two systems will accept a perfectly valid, RFC822-compliant e-mail address with an ampersand character (&) in the local part, which gets rejected as an "illegal e-mail address". The excuse is that "it's not allowed by GovTalk", which is MS-speak for "Our security model is so fundamentally broken that we cannot allow any input containing an ampersand in case the server gets compromised".

The irony is that all of this arose out of an ongoing e-mail correspondence with HMRC and the Cabinet Office using... yes, you guessed it!... the "illegal" e-mail address with the ampersand in it!!