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Leader: Linux in government - better late than never
Will the OSA loosen Microsoft's grip?

By silicon.com

Published: Thursday 02 March 2006

Some people might be surprised that the government is only just waking up to the idea that open source is secure, stable and attractive to end users.

Better late than never, though.

And to be honest, Whitehall has been getting cannier about its software spending. Increasingly it has been aggregating demand across the public sector into mega-deals that get government agencies better value than their own bargaining power could have achieved.

But the public sector, in all its various forms, still spends tens of millions each year on proprietary software - including that from Microsoft.

And so the government should get a good return on the small amount of money it has spent on the Open Source Academy - especially if the OSA successfully builds a business case that shows local authorities how they can save money by moving off of their proprietary software packages.

Many authorities might see the attraction of leaving proprietary offerings behind yet don't have the luxury of testing out these ideas on anything other than a very small scale.

But with something as repeatable as migrating desktops to open source, many organisations can learn from the OSA's projects.

IT departments in the private sector are also rarely big enough to take on this kind of research, although many are facing exactly the same dilemmas about what to do with open source. They too can learn from these projects.

The concept of the OSA makes a lot of sense, as a single testing bed for potentially disruptive technologies. Perhaps there are other technologies that could benefit from the same treatment, for example in the mobile space.

After all, why force every part of government to to reinvent the wheel - or in this case rediscover the penguin?