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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.'"
Yeah, my lot have to manage the transition to Windows 7 for a whole bunch of bespoke applications. We got shot of IE6 and heavens, we were glad, because our stupid timesheet software used ActiveX so we had to ditch that too.
The only thing really holding us back from moving to Linux is MS Office. The NHS had an enterprise-wide license, which a back-of-napkin estimate says must have cost on the order of £100M per year. That got dropped a while ago, I'm guessing because it was a big fat line item in the budget and made a ripe target for people saying "hey, what if we spent some small fraction of that on LibreOffice development?".
A lot of our bespoke apps are Java and thus don't really need Windows to work. Web apps are web apps.
But we, like everywhere, I suspect, have a large number of things cobbled together from VBA and spit, not to mention the things people do with Access. Any coherent plan to move to Linux, or even LibreOffice, needs a department dedicated to migrating VBA and Access applications.