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UK Government Mandates 'Preference' For Open Source
An anonymous reader writes "ComputerWeekly reports that the U.K. government 'has, for the first time, mandated a preference for using open source software for future developments.' This comes from the newly released version of the Government Service Design Manual, which has a section about when government agencies should use open source. It says: 'Use open source software in preference to proprietary or closed source alternatives, in particular for operating systems, networking software, web servers, databases and programming languages.' The document also warns against vendor lock-in. This policy shift comes under the direction of government CTO Liam Maxwell, who said, 'In digital public services, open source software is clearly the way forward.' He added, 'We're not dogmatic about this – we'll always use the best tool for the job – but open source has major advantages for the public sector.'"
Picking winners and losers, while exercising totalitarian control over others.
This tyranny will never last, it is the enemy of the people, and will soon be destroyed by the more efficient free-market.
(Sarcasm mode disengage)
Who's this Liam Maxwell? Sounds like a commie.
anyone on the other side of the pond know if this is a real attempt to push OSS software or if it's just another attempt to get discounted Microsoft software?
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As I know, programmers and Linux admins cost twice to three times as much as their Windows admin counterpart. However, OSS is free.
Can anyone that's an IT director please clarify the gap, skillset, and possible configuring a network so complicated as to solidify job security for said admins? Which costs more and can deliver the most value? On that front, which set of admins is likely to engage in such dishonest practices? Or is it a out the same for both sets of admins?
And yes, there are many Windows/Linux admins that can do both with an indepth skillset and experience, but they command a premium salary as I know.
Life is not for the lazy.
Mirth Connect, an open source (MPL) healthcare integration engine, has been out now for 7 years. It's amazing to me that healthcare entities around the world strapped for cash still pay for closed source alternatives to Connect. I hope that this change will at the least get folks in the UK to take a look at the tool and try it out.
"We're not dogmatic about this – we'll always use the best tool for the job".
That's one of the most interesting points in the article. More people should think like that. In the end, software is just a tool.
Governments should be forbidden from using non-Free software. Go ahead and get your company into whatever vendor lock-in you want, but public data should never be subjected to it.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Ahem... Good analogy, bad conclusion...
If the government did this, it would be in trouble as soon as the vehicle needs maintenance. Or if you wanted to modify the vehicle later. If you MUST go back to the vendor for this, you have just accepted the fate of a captive customer - good luck in the negotiations.
You're contradicting yourself.
Openness has clear and undoubted benefits for the public sector, and so not surprisingly this customer made openness a default requirement. He's not mandating against proprietary software, but if a software company can't give him the desired openness then it's not fulfilling his requirement. Given his requirement, open source tools are the best tools by default, but not the only ones.
The customer decides the requirements, not the provider. Live with it.
Is it open source or free software? stop calling free software "open source". Open is not free.
I think this is a good move, but not exactly the right one. There's nothing inherently wrong with closed source, it's vendor lock-in they should be worried about.
Instead of mandating a PREFERENCE for OPEN SOURCE software, they should mandate a REQUIREMENT for software that abides by OPEN STANDARDS. To avoid vendor lock-in, they should forbid any kind of functionality that is vendor-specific.
> Linux admins cost twice to three times as much as their Windows admin counterpart
Where did you get this information? Please make sure you do an apples-to-apples comparison.
For example: don't compare somebody who does admin for 5 servers to somebody who does admin for 2000 servers.
Here's another reason which underlines your point:
- A government has no mandate to entrust the country's data to a corporation nor to allow it to leak. It is therefore simply not permissible to allow that data to be processed by closed source software which by definition cannot be trusted.
The above should be self-evident, but in case it's not, objectors would do well to ponder the acknowledged backdoors in Skype and in a variety of Chinese routers. With open source, this cannot easily happen.
And by that I mean actually open, not OOXML.
Working for a company that went through the mountains of red tape, STIG's, regulations, restrictions and general hoopla involved to get the government to accept any product into their infrastructure, I can say with a fairly high certainty that most Open Source software is going to have a problem getting past those requirements. How much Open Source is FIPS certified? How much is CC certified? How much of it can claim that no part of the software was written by non-US citizens? The list goes on and on...
It takes a lot of focused effort on issues that are not at all technical in nature, not to mention a lot of money for various certifications, to get a software package past all the hurdles to be used in a government setting.
I work at a place that has a similar policy. Doesn't stop us from using way to many proprietary solutions that are actually worse than the Open Source solution. A lot of that is down to OS religion and people not actually understanding what Open Source is. We have managers (and directors) that believe the software needs to be a shrink wrapped solution from a proprietary vendor like Microsoft to be a decent solution and to be able to get 'Enterprise' level support. Many don't realise that just because you can get an Open Source solution for free that; It is just as good as the non Open Source solution and if you really feel you need to pay for 'Enterprise' support and if this is something you need then for a large number of the solutions you would be realistically looking at, that is supplied as well. For the ones I have investigatedt, support has usually worked out to be cheaper than the closed source solution as well.
Just my $0.02.
As I understand it, it means "if two products are equally suitable for the given purpose, but one is open source and the other isn't, then choose the open source one." Not too different to the rules for employing women or people with disabilities, where you also are not disallowed to employ men or people without disabilities.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That's not nearly good enough, not by a mile.
Open standards are not sufficient to allow a government's experts to check software for backdoors and data leaks. This puts closed-source software in direct conflict with the needs of national security and sovereignty, even when it uses open standards.
A company has the luxury to risk its data to closed-source software if it wants to, and to fail if its trust is misplaced. A government does not have this luxury.
This is a small step in the right direction, but nothing more. Hopefully it will start to resemble a larger trend.
Just the opposite. If the data is important and must be protected then it should never be exposed to closed-source software, since this is always untrustworthy by definition.
This is particularly so for governments, who go to great lengths to ensure security and secrecy of their data. To let closed-source software have access to it would be the height of negligence. Indeed, it would be quite comical security theater , and a good reason for putting department heads on the chopping block.
> Governments should be required to use open standards. Thus allowing open and closed source offerings to compete.
You've made a common and rather elementary mistake in the above. You confused two different activities of government:
1) A government may decide to promote competition in the software arena, if this is one of its goals and if it has an appropriate programme. This is a matter of optional policy, and it will vary from government to government.
2) A government also has a security requirement to safeguard its own data and sovereignty. This is NOT a matter of optional policy, it is an inherent part of a government's duty to its citizens and cannot be negotiated away. In particular, it cannot be negotiated away in order to assist with item 1).
You have conflated these two things together, and so you mistake the execution of a government's own internal requirements with optional external programmes to promote trade. They are completely distinct activities and cannot be mixed without impacting on government security, so your point is invalid.
The last time that the UK gov mandated open-source and open-standards Bill Gates flew in for a private lunch with Tony Blair and the whole thing got quietly dropped ....
In local government the push for open-source was often a negotiating ploy with Microsoft
Monopoly contracts to governments always ask for trouble. Bribes are far more likely but so are a long list of democracy undermining financial incentives. Such as propaganda ("think" tanks) and corrupting all aspects of the process including institutions which have input to the decisions (ISO on MS office) to name just two.
Software is a different kind of monopoly contract but it is still no different than real-world services such as power, water, sewer, garbage, recycling, bridges, phone, internet, construction, maintenance, and even tax preparation.
Did you know having the IRS do your taxes for you use CHEAPER and easier? CA did it but accounting lobbyists killed it. It is not like all accountants were jobless; complex situations still require pros. It is the tax software industry that was hurt... who ALSO sell the IRS auditing software so that you get an extra automated audit by specialized software built for what you used to prepare your taxes. If there is a bug, good luck! I know somebody who's quickbooks audit said they were doing something illegal and the IRS agent who manually review everything couldn't OK things because the software kept saying something crooked was going on. The agent too a long time with many checks (higher ups) to finally bypass the software. They determined that Inuit had a bug in the IRS software.
I am a fan of open source, but we shouldn't be mandating EITHER way. ..... A good analogy is if the UK government mandated that fleet vehicles have their design and manufacturing processes laid bare, or they wouldn't buy the vehicles. I really don't care about the processes documentation - buy the best car at the best price.
Wrong car analogy. Unlike software, it is easy to replace one type of car with another if the first is unsatisfactory.
Nevertheless, I once worked in ship design for the Royal Navy and every detail of the design WAS required. We needed (among other things) to be damn sure that the ships were maintainable by any dockyard - not just the one that built it for example.
Why would the government get specific and suggest that 'operating systems, networking software, web servers, databases and programming languages' be open sourced in particular? How does it matter whether the databases or programming languages be 'open' (and what do those mean, anyway?) Yeah, it helps for the OS to be open sourced, so that someone like HP can't pull an Itanium over you, making you dump perfectly good Alphaservers. It helps for networking to be standard, say IPv6, so that people working w/ this won't need to learn a brand new protocol. It helps for programming languages to be well known languages and not something arcane, such as Ada. But other than that, why does it matter whether those things are open sourced or not? It's more important that the applications that will be primarily used be open source, so that the government can buy whatever hardware it finds most suitable, independent of the software, and just ports everything to that. That's what will help them realize all the advantages of open source.
Enough people have made the point about security of government data here that ignoring that requirement must be deliberate.
Closed-source software cannot be entrusted with the security and hence sovereignty of a nation because it is untrusted by definition, and governments do not have a legal mandate to hand the keys of the nation's security to a corporation.
That makes the use of closed source for anything involving sensitive government data totally inconsistent with a government's single most important and overriding requirement. Just being allowed to examine a company's source code is not sufficicent either, because that does not tell you what's in the binary.
The only way in which a corporation that supplies closed source software can satisfy the essential government security requirement is by handing over the source code to the government department to compile and build personally. NDA for this is adequate, although it provides less assurance of security than publicly open source. Nothing less will suffice though. Closed source is essentially an abrogation of security.
Document formats. If you change suppliers later can you use all the files you created or are they locked in to your current supplier? Also are you dictating that those you send documents use the same software to read it that you used to create it thereby as government giving a defacto monopoly to your supplier?
Mod parent down.
I call BS. There is practically no vendor lock-in these days to the actual data and content you manage using "office-productivity" suites, whether they be MSFT Office or OpenOffice. Each of these suites can import and export data at zero transactional cost. Agencies should make their purchasing decisions based on what toolset actually does a better job - and for more sophisticated jobs that probably means ponying up some money for a quality product.
Interesting that Liam Maxwell and his band of zealots is not demanding open source for mainframe systems and databases - provided, purely coincidentally of course - by IBM and Oracle respectively, who both fund the so-called "Open Forum Europe" (OFE), Microsoft-bashing outfit that is now deeply embedded in the heart of government.
This decision has nothing to do with saving the government money or promoting open source - it is about lining the pockets of OSS developers and consultants who will cost the taxpayer more in the long run and all promoted by one Steve Hilton, former special adviser to the Prime Minister who's wife just happens to be married to a senior Google executive - the third pillar of OFE.
I may not have liked MSFT's sleazy tactics in the past, trying to hold on to customers by locking them in to proprietary data formats - but they are at least behaving seriously as a marlet player today. Google, IBM and Oracle, on the other hand, with their cohorts in OFE have taken government corruption to a whole new level.
From what I understand, most document formats can be converted into other formats, and once that's possible, there isn't a real lock-in to the supplier. MS in particular - both Libre Office and Calligra can read Word format documents, and once documents are saved in their native formats, they are good to go. But it would be more important that open source software be used, so that they can be ported to any future platform, and that government IT personnel can go for the most cost effective hardware without having to factor in whether the required software runs on them.
On the OS aspect of this, though, I'm not sure that Linux would necessarily be the right solution here, although for now, Linux & PC-BSD may well be the only solutions. I think that in the long term, something like osFree would be ideal, since it is based on a portable - and ported - microkernel such as the L4. The other option - if a lock-in to x86 is acceptable - would be something like ReactOS, which has enough perfectly good XP software available for it, which would largely eliminate the need to buy new software licenses.