By Nick Heath, 29 September 2009 15:56
NEWS
The UK government may have been slow to adopt open source software but there are signs that the tide may be turning.
In February the CIO Council published a policy designed to stimulate the uptake of open source across the public sector.
The policy has been attacked in some quarters for failing to provoke a shift to open source but Westminster insiders and some open source vendors claim that changes are starting to take place.
October will see the launch of the National Digital Resource Bank (NDRB), a digital store of educational materials for teachers, which is based on an open source platform.
Mark Taylor is founder and former president of the Open Source Consortium and CEO of open source consultants Sirius Corporation, which will manage and localise the NDRB.
"The policy is having a positive effect," he said. "This [an open source platform powering the NDRB] could not have existed before the policy came through, it enabled public sector organisations to say I am going down an open source route.
"There are some projects that have already come out of it and for the first time we have seen government tenders coming through requesting open source software."
Another trailblazer for open source in the public sector is the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The Westminster department plans to run all of its Intel servers on Linux software and runs half of its main set of database management tools using open source software managed by Ingres. More ambitiously staff are discussing how to create an open source app store, with its aim being to give out software to help the public make sense of government statistics.
Simon Field, chief technology officer with the ONS, told silicon.com it was inevitable that the public sector would increase its use of open source software, due to its lower cost and greater interoperability when compared to proprietary software.
"What will cause open source to succeed in the public sector is the squeeze on the money and the drive towards sharing more services and information. This will force us to start taking open source more seriously.
"There has already been quite a substantial use of open source about half of the government servers are based on Apache."
Field predicted the areas of the public sector where open source could flourish was within organisations that contained the greatest amount of in-house technical expertise, such as the BBC, the Met Office and Ordnance Survey.
Sirius' Taylor said opening up the public sector to the open source market would introduce much-needed competition to how government buys its IT software and services.
"At the moment the public sector is spending £16bn a year on IT procurement and that is going to about eight different companies, clearly there are some issues there," he said.
The benefits of open source software are clear to Jeremy Tuck, CIO of Islington Council, which uses open source software to power its document management system and runs its website off a content management system provided by open source provider Alfresco.
"The licensing cost was a real issue. We could not have rolled out a [proprietary document management system] in the way that we did for 4,000 users.
"It would have been £450 a seat the ongoing annual support would have been £65 a seat. We had to take a very different approach from a financial point of view."
But the process of making the jump to open source can be a painful experience, he said, as organisations need to continue to pay licensing costs for their old proprietary software while they transfer old files into the new open source system, with Tuck adding "the integration costs is an area where we have been clobbered".
Tuck was also sceptical about the impact that the CIO Council's policy has had on the uptake of open source across the wider public sector. He said it "had not affected the way in which local authorities procure software", adding "there is no real incentive [to follow it] it is just a guide."
The policy - a restatement of principles first laid out by the government in 2004 - stipulates that public sector bodies should choose open source software packages "where there is no significant overall cost difference between open and non-open source products".
But it seems that some old habits die hard and Taylor admitted he still saw councils buying new software packages whose tender documents were only asking for a single non-open source proprietary system, such as Microsoft Office.
"There is still a gap between policy and practice whenever there is a policy change it takes time to work through," he said.
John Powell, chief executive and founder of open source content management specialist Alfresco, maintained that the level of spending on open source in the public sector remained at about five per cent of the total spend on IT, compared to about 20 per cent in mainland Europe.
Some open source vendors believe the government needs to get tougher with public sector bodies that are failing to pay proper attention to the CIO Council's policy.
Steve Shine, executive VP of worldwide operations at Ingres, said: "There needs to be a person inside the Office of Government Commerce who is responsible for seeing if tenders going through government are adhering to the principles of the policy."
The idea found favour with the ONS' Field, who thought it would speed up the inevitable shift towards more open source software in the public sector.
"We have got to look at more open source and open standards, I like the idea of having a Tsar to police it," he said.
Comments
There are 2 comments. Join the discussion
1. Gareth Evans
The article is too judgemental and critical of people who don't choose Open Source.
It would be good to know if the ONS were a user of the INGRES database product BEFORE it became Open Source. Because that would mean that a major decision on their infrastructure wasn't really made in favour of Open Source.
And, of course, people tender for MS Office because they don't want to retrain everybody and retrain every new employee who was already familier with Office.
2. Ollie Clark
I thought the article was being critical of people who don't /consider/ open source, not those who don't /choose/ it.
As for retraining for an open source Office suite, if my workplace is anything to go by, most of the people using MS Office could do with being trained anyway so it doesn't make much difference if that's in MS Office (which they can't use properly) or Open Office (which they haven't seen and can't use properly).