UK Sets Open Source Procurement Policy

An anonymous submitter notes a story in the Register about the UK publishing their policy on the use of Open Source software. (Or skip straight to the policy itself.) The UK has been moving towards this for a while, and while they don't rule out using proprietary code, the policy definitely recognizes the benefits of OSS.

Comments

o/~ money, money money o/~

[Mr_Silver]

Wheee!!

I look forward to Bill Gates parachuting into the UK and depositing a ... ahem ... small donation to help us sort out the mess that is our railways!

TCO

[nate1138]

Quoth the article:

UK Government will consider OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements. Contracts will be awarded on a value for money basis.

Maybe now we can get some real total cost of ownership analysis for linux systems. IMHO this is something that has been lacking (except of course for the TCO workups done by Microsoft, and those can't be considered accurate. Not because they are from MS, but because they are being used as tools to outsell a competitor, and therefore are immediately suspect.) Having those numbers, as well as some solid cost-benefit analysis should help speed corporate adoption.

Re:TCO

[swillden]

No, it's not complicated at all. You're just making a lot of hidden assumptions, that's all. Those assumptions may or may not be invalid, but determining the facts of the situation requires research, not statements about the blinding obviousness of the conclusions.

You are assuming:

• There is no retraining cost with using Windows-based tools. This one is easily disprovable.
• There are significant retraining costs with using Linux-based tools. This one is really complex, and the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no.
• There are no TCO implications of a given configuration outside of license fees and training costs. This one is also easy to disprove. What's not clear at all is which solution has the better TCO (which was where the whole discussion started).
• De facto standards are more important than de jure standards. In the short term, I suppose this is often true. In the long term, this attitude would screw the whole industry badly. The right approach is not to blithely accept that only IE works with some web sites, the right approach is to *fix* the web sites so they're compliant with standards. That will have other benefits far beyond allowing other browsers to use sites. For example, creation of automated systems that talk to web sites for you is becoming more popular, and standards compliance makes those systems easier to build and less prone to bugs. Also, aging of proprietary formats is a real problem, and one that is likely going to bite us hard in a few years. Adherence to standards helps a great deal with this problem.
• Finally, you're assuming that all users and all companies have needs similar to yours. I'm working with a client right now who sees a lot of value in Linux because their users _don't understand it_. This client wants their users to have a few, specific apps to do a few, specific things and they don't want their users mucking about with anything else. They also want centralized management of all of those systems, which is easier and cheaper with UNIX-type system.

if the open source folks want to build software that can be seriously considered as an alternative to the tools people already use, they must not force the user base to compromise.

Ah, here's another faulty assumption: Forcing the user to change is equivalent to forcing the user to compromise. Change can be for the better. Many companies didn't want to pay the costs for retraining Win98 users on Win2K, but the superior stability of Win2K convinced them that the change was beneficial. My laptop has 43 days of continuous uptime right now, and it only got rebooted a month and a half ago because I wanted to play a Windows-only game. That's a system that goes through a zillion suspends, hibernates, has four different kinds of PCMCIA network cards and a half dozen USB devices attached and removed on a regular basis. That kind of rock-solid reliability is worth something.

I will change to another operating system if, and only if, it benefits me to do so.

Not me. I'll change just because I like variety. But that's just me; when making a decision as to whether or not to convert an office staff to a different system, only an idiot would do it on a whim. What I'm really saying here is: "Well, DUH!"

Giving me software that's equivalent to, but different from, what I use now will not motivate me to change.

Here's another mistaken assumption: You seem to believe that open source developers want you to use something else. Trust me: we couldn't care less what you use. We'll use what works for us. Now, I do care what my government uses, and I think representative Villanueva from Peru did an admirable job of explaining why open source software has a fundamental advantage over proprietary software, and TCO has little or nothing to do with it (although I think that in many -- not all -- cases OSS has lower TCO). For that reason I applaud the UK policy shift, and encourage them to strengthen it.

awesome!

[cswiii]

First it's a loosening of their marijuana laws, and now an endorsement for open-sourced software.

Who ever thought the stodgy old British government would be this... progressive?

Re:awesome!

[agdv]

First it's a loosening of their marijuana laws, and now an endorsement for open-sourced software.

Maybe they're related?

No, can't be. They would have to be on crack, not pot.

(let the flame fest begin!)

Guess the clue stick hit the right head.

[Soko]

"# UK Government will only use products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments.

Here it is, people - the best reason to use OSS software. It follows Open Standards, without the need for things that "enhance" or "differentiate" it from the rest. Stright from the RFC to your OS. It means that "proprietary lock-in" won't be a problem, should you decide to switch vendors.

Sun didn't get this with Java, and if history repeats itself, some business hack at Microsoft will try to sew up market share by leveraging what even MS is saying is an Open Standard.

I sound like a broken record here, but Open Standards should have the weight of Law in IT. If you extened a Standard, you should either open the code for the extention or have it clearly labelled as a proprietary extention.

Until this happens, I'll be treading very carefully through the OS mine field.

(GAHHHH!!! a Minesweeper reference!!! I'm DOOMED!)

Soko

ph33rf of London in Redmond

[supabeast!]

"UK Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services"

At the moment this sentence hit the web, Microsoft began accepting resumes for fifty lobbyists with bad teeth and old-world accents.

Anyone else notice...

[Dark Paladin]

Most of these governments looking at OSS software are non-United States governments?

I'm wondering how much of this is "OSS is good eatin'!", and how much is "Holy shit, do we really want software from another government running all our shit? I mean, if war breaks out between France and the US, and they don't allow Windows exports, that would be catastrophic!"

Re:Anyone else notice...

[markmoss]

I mean, if war breaks out between France and the US, and they don't allow Windows exports, that would be catastrophic!

Nah, the French would surrender before they even got Linux downloaded, let alone noticed how much better it is. 8-)

Amen.

[Skyshadow]

Amen to that. I've been successful in convincing my managers to go with an OSS (often the only ones adhering to open standards 100%) solution several times using this arguement.

The big advantage of this is that you don't need to get technical to explain it and there's no reasonable-sounding counterarguement the sales droids from whatever vendor can use to counter you. It's simple: "Boss, if we start using their product, we'll be locked in. After we've put enough work into it they'll hold our own data hostage and will be free to charge us whatever they want. Now, with this product, we can move to another package at any time because they use an approved, published standard."

My hope is that once enough businesses realize the sense of this arguement, commercial software will be forced to adhere to standards to compete. And after all, healthy competition is really what OSS is all about, isn't it?

Governments and OSS

[Lumpy]

It blows my mind that it has taken governments until the 21's century to understand this. The UK being the first to realize it in a beginning way.

You want examples? Sure :-) I'll use US centric ones.. The US Govt, Fed level develops census and data gathering software, probably written in Fortran as it was the popular thing to do. They wrote software that would gather important data on census, basic voter info (voter registration) employee payroll/hours/tracking/etc/ resource management ... etc...

why the hell wasn't all of that software open-sourced so that the state and city governments could have used it? even if not as-is they could have modified it... thus eliminating re-inventing the wheel tens-of-thousands of times all across the country. all that money wasted just to feed some programmer's egos?

Open Source should be the number one requirement for any government software.... GIS is the current love of governments... my local municapality bought a GIS system ( completely ignored GRASS with the basis that free can't be useful software) that cannot import state level data-sets because the state bought a GIS system that is also closed. so now we have to waste more money and man-hours to convert that data.

Any govt that installs a policy that everything MUST BE open source will move ahead faster than any other in data manipulation and gathering. There is no doubt about it, and there is nothing the closed source companies can or will do to combat such capabilities.

Computer science is still in the stone ages because we force ourseoves to reinvent everything every day.

I work in UK Government and this won't make a diff

[McCall]

I work for a large local council, and this policy won't make a difference to be quite honest....

Its not policies like these that hold Linux back from running the UK government's servers, its the staff. Very few governments actually hire staff to work on Linux, and the attitude towards Linux is like its some crack-ball OS. You have to remember that staff turn over in UK governments is very low, and many of the staff are not in IT because they love IT, they are there because its a stable job with half decent pay and couldn't care less about Linux or OSS.

If it wasn't for myself campaining to use Linux for our Internet servers they would have been replaced very recently with Microsoft ones that would no doubt have been left unsecure and unreliable. This was going to happen for no reason other than some badly written ASP code didn't work on Chili!Soft and Apache.

The government where I work as a IT team of about 60 people, we have 4 people who are UNIX System Administrators, I myself am the only person who is a dedicated Linux System Administrator, the rest are Microsoft based Administrators. Now imagine being the only voice saying "Use Linux, its free, stable and reliable" to the managers - believe me you don't get heard.

Another problem is the fact that many projects have no involvement from the UNIX team at all, so even if there is a better piece of OSS, they won't know about it, and the MS Administrators who are involved with the project won't look for it.

I know the benefits of OSS and can tell all the staff that we don't need another Windows/Solaris server until I am blue in the face, but when high-level managers demand to use a product they have heard of, this puts pressure on the IT managers to introduce that software. You don't get the average UK council worker snooping around Linux software I can tell you! 90% of the software they want to use runs under Windows.

A conference for governments that I recently went to that was teaching the benefits of OSS and Linux only had around 8 people on it, I am also sure that this is representative of the councils that are actually going to take notice of this policy.

These are just a few reasons why all in all - it won't make a difference, there are many more. It does really frustrate me knowing that a very large amount of my taxes gets spent on software that could be obtained for free, or next to nothing.