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.'"

Comments

Is this real?

[rsilvergun]

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?

Re:Is this real?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

it's just another attempt to get discounted Microsoft software?

Of course it is! What else did you think?

-- Sir Humphrey Appleby

Re:Is this real?

[benilov]

You betcha. The Government Service Design Manual comes from GDS, a part of the Cabinet Office. GDS also created GOV.UK - the new single domain for the UK government. The GOV.UK stack is almost entirely open-source software, which can be found on Github under the Open Government License.

Re:Is this real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting AC.

There are certain public services in the UK that have real issues at the moment, IT-wise, due to the general austerity measures in place to reduce the deficit.

There are large sections of the UK police force stuck using IE6 due to dependancies on ActiveX.
XP is being EOL'ed next year.
The money isn't there to deal with the situation.

There's a lot of people campaigning for a move to open-source so nothing like this happens again.

Re:Is this real?

[gmuslera]

Maybe this had something to do with it.

Re:Is this real?

[ais523]

I think it's a response to most of their existing proprietary attempts to do things having been trainwrecks. I guess the reasoning is that at least this way, the trainwrecks will be less expensive on average.

Re:Is this real?

[Dr_Barnowl]

I like this trend, but I think Open Government License is counterproductive Not-Invented-Hereism. It's basically a BSD-style license, but also contains an exhortation not to break British law.

Well, British law is already an exhortation not to break British law. You don't need an extra one. They should just use Apache 2 if they want a BSD-style license ; everyone's IP legal department already knows it.

Re:Is this real?

[Dr_Barnowl]

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.

Re:Is this real?

[julian67]

Yes it's real. If you can get past the partisan political bloggers and established media who don't usually notice anything in IT related tech beyond Apple, Google, MS and Samsung press releases then you can discover that the Conservative party (the larger partner in the coalition administration) has some well informed and rational policies in these areas. We've had several decades of IT school level education being no more than training people to use proprietary software for clerical tasks, while the government paid vast sums to middlemen for huge projects which failed to deliver while costs rose. Vast sums of money have been siphoned off to giant corporations like Microsoft, Serco and Fujitsu, for minimal benefit. Governments of all complexions have been guilty of terrible negligence and possibly corruption, but finally a few people who understand the severity of these problems and wish to fix them find themselves in government, and good luck to them. I'm not (so far) a Conservative voter, nor a member of any political party.

Re:Is this real?

[rtb61]

You have to consider that for other countries M$ is a dead loss, tons of money going out with no return. Pushing FOSS means that if an offshot of a major campaign contributing company sets up in that market you can readily funnel money to them and look really good in the polls when doing so. Basically FOSS in also going to be a double plus win for pollies.

Re:Is this real?

[jonbryce]

"British Law", whatever that might be [1] only applies to people living in Britain. Having it in the licence means you aren't allowed to break it even if you are outside the country.

[1] There's English/Welsh law, Scottish Law and Northern Irish Law. They are similar in many ways, but three different legal systems.

Re:Is this real?

[starfishsystems]

So if they are serious about this, why does their shitty new jobsearch website require CVs to be uploaded in .doc or docx formats?

Because not everything happens at once, especially in government. Nor is the public sector is famous for agile development.

Government, by its nature, is bureaucratic. When we're on the the receiving end of government services, we often perceive the bureaucracy as ponderous and inefficient. That's because accountability is a big part of the system. I've worked in government IT alongside some really progressive, dedicated and talented people where we had a clear mandate, ample funding and few political enemies. I figure in this best case scenario we spent 80% of our time on project tracking and accountability.

See, you never have to turn a profit in government. But you will be audited. You'll be asked to show the work you've done and justify it. Knowing that the audit is coming, you make friends with the auditors and ask them what controls need to be put in place. Since you have to be in compliance eventually, that's the most efficient course of action, but it adds a chunk of overhead up front. There may be several auditing bodies: one for finance, one for security, one for privacy, one for ethics, one for affirmative action. And of course there are other controls to make you accountable to your boss, and he to his boss and so on.

But you're also accountable to your colleagues. Unlike in the private sector, there's no such thing as "good enough". As a business owner, I can decide to launch a product at any moment I decide the time is right. No matter how broken it may be and no matter whether the market is ready for it or not, that's my exclusive decision. Not so in government. All it takes is someone at a meeting to raise the idea of a unit test that could possibly be done and suddenly you're on the hook to do it. This is not because your colleague can tell you what to do, but because his comments were minuted and those minutes were circulated to all the stakeholders - which includes your department head, who is now responsible to ensure that if anyone in future ever asks about that unit test, you will be able to give him the test logs. And let me tell you, half of all government workers are worry warts. They sincerely think that coming up with new things to worry about is a positive contribution to a project. To be fair, sometimes it is.

See how it works? Now, along comes a new mandate which says not merely to "evaluate" open source but to "prefer" it. People who are running projects that have already done their initial requirements gathering and compliance controls and are now onto architecture and design, what are those people going to do? Their first reflex is not going to be to go back to the drawing board. Not in a million years. Their first reflex is going to be to hold a series of meetings to show due diligence in evaluating whether or not the project now underway is subject to the new open source mandate.

On the other hand, any new project to come along is going to be subject to the open source mandate. People who don't like it will privately grumble but they'll go along. People like me who've been waiting for the mandate will happily embrace it. And then it's payback time. We'll be the people in the meetings raising the questions about due diligence in respect of open source compliance. We'll be the ones suggesting cost and performance controls for existing projects so that in future we can measure their value against comparable open source projects.

Open source will win out. Open Document Format will eventually win out. On merit, mind you. You just have to understand that government moves very slowly and cautiously. But once it becomes a matter of policy you can take it to the bank that these things will happen.

Re:Yet another government mandate!

[Immerman]

Amen Brother! Tell it like it is!

Good thing we have Microsoft to fight against such totalitarian overreach. Freedom from choice! Freedom from excess money! Freedom!

Cost for software vs skill set

[DigiShaman]

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.

Re:Cost for software vs skill set

[DamonHD]

Things have changed for the better for Windows I am quite sure, but back in the days when I was a UNIX sysadmin for a living you needed 10x as many Windows admins as UNIX admins for the same number of machines / user seats, so a simple salary ratio would be misleading!

Rgds

Damon

Re:Cost for software vs skill set

[marcosdumay]

Scripting involves simplifying or automating a process using pre-existing functions in whatever software you're scripting against. Programming involves creating new functions where previously such a module or action did not exist in the first place.

Hum, I take from this that the computers that run your programs don't have an instruction set, and you don't program in a language... As those are pre-existing functions that most people use to automate stuff.

One involves creating limited functionality with the elements given to you. The other is creating whole new elements from the ground up.

Yeah, limited to the turing complete shells available.

Ok, you can't write device drivers in Bash. But it seems that you have no idea what you are talking about.

Re:Cost for software vs skill set

[Nerdfest]

That's not the definition of open source software. Isn't that 'libre' software? Open source just means that you have the source. Personally, I'd prefer it if they mandated FOSS. Question though ... if MS made their products open source, could you maintain it yourself ... or would that be something that could be restricted by licence? The way I see it you could do anything you wanted with it within your own business. Anything else would be against copyright laws.

It's only a suggestion, not a mandate

[menot]

"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.

It's not enough

[Stormwatch]

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.

Re:It's not enough

[cobbaut]

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.

Mod parent insightful.

Re:It's not enough

[Stormwatch]

Open Source cannot compete on bribes with proprietary software

Fix'd.

Re:It's not enough

[whoever57]

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.

No. This is wrong. Governments should be required to use open standards. Thus allowing open and closed source offerings to compete.

Furthermore, if it turns out that a supplier claimed compliance with an open standard but did not deliver this, there should be serious penalties levied against the supplier (and not just a slap on the wrist that the supplier will see as merely "cost of doing business"). The penalties could include requiring the supplier to make their version of the standard open to all.

Re:It's not enough

[maxwell demon]

Another requirement should be that the supplier allows the government to inspect the source code in order to make sure there are no backdoors in the code. With Open Source, this is automatic; for Closed Source solutions, it would be an additional requirement in the contract.

Re:It's not enough

[tlhIngan]

Furthermore, if it turns out that a supplier claimed compliance with an open standard but did not deliver this, there should be serious penalties levied against the supplier (and not just a slap on the wrist that the supplier will see as merely "cost of doing business"). The penalties could include requiring the supplier to make their version of the standard open to all.

No, that's insufficient.

Make the penalty forced open-source, under a modified BSD license that includes patent licensing. Because you cannot be sure there's some oddball part of the spec they've overlooked (and EVERY standard that's complex has corner cases and little known side effects) or other thing. It's forcing the standard to be open by releasing reference code, effectively.

Why not GPL? Because the threat of BSD means that competitors are free to use that code in their closed-source implementation, and have patent licenses for that.

The loss of the crown jewels, forced patent licenses, AND breaking of 3rd party licensing agreements should put enough fear into closed source companies competing to be on the straight and narrow with respect to the standards.

Openness is the customer requirement

[Anonymous Coward]

You are clearly not basing this on what is the best tool (even if the open source happens to be the best tool).

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.

Also, closed source and backdoors

[Anonymous Coward]

Governments should be forbidden from using non-Free software.

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.

Open file formats should be mandatory

[walterbyrd]

And by that I mean actually open, not OOXML.

Re:Open file formats should be mandatory

[Dr_Barnowl]

I have to disagree. Most of the formats I see developed this way end up horrible messes because they hire a whole bunch of consultants to do the work.

The difficulty with that is that contractors are paid by the hour, so you don't get

* Re-use of other standards where appropriate

I've seen people reinvent the wheel so many times it's not true. This is true from simple little things like time values in XML (xsd:time sensibly uses ISO8601, this lot made up their own format, with ensuing hilarity when implementers think that their standard XML tool kit date / time types will produce valid documents), diagram formats (they just copied another standard verbatim into their documents rather than saying - "Hey, lets use this standard and say so"), and document formats (they didn't like the ability of XHTML to have script tags in it, so they copied THAT as well).

* Simplicity

Simple designs that work don't generate billable hours. Complex monsters that require hours of argument over the finer points of what they actually mean, do.

* Implementations

Implementations are essential for the development of standards. If you don't implement them, you don't get any kind of feel for the actual needs of the problem domain and how well your design is solving them. Alas, standards developed by publicly funded committee in my experience don't bother with this, and typically don't include any actual software engineers to tell them what problems they might be causing for implementers down the line.

Things like pretending an identifier is an integer when all the handling means you have to treat it like a string (it consists of four separate fields, one of them optional, but as a stream of digits and not bytes). Or taking a set of metadata that you have to understand to read the data, and .. embedding that data inside the data itself. Or creating an abstract data type with a contract and then insisting that people store it without thinking about it's concrete requirements.

Formats thought up by corporations at least have the benefit of their creators not wanting to spend as much time as possible debating the finer points of the thing. They want something that works, but as evidenced by MOO-XML, practicality often means they end up with a real mess as well - but at least it's a real mess, and not just a theoretical mess.

I think "Open" is more important than "Standard". "Standard" gives the appearance of authority, but "Open" means you have a chance of things being useful.

MOO-XML is a horrifying mess. Not even MS Office implements it. It's a "standard", having been ratified by ISO, but nothing about it's development was "open".

FreeMind is a small java mind-map program. FreeMind format isn't a "standard", but it is "open". And it is useful - useful enough that most of the other mind-map programs will import it. You can open the files up in a text editor, or feed them through XSLT, or consume them with a program and do interesting things with them. And if you want a feature implemented in it, you can patch the sources, and even feed the patch back upstream.

I think collaboration on trying to solve a problem benefits from some actual problem solving, rather than just talking about what the problem might be and how it might be solved if so.

Re:Not dogmatic?

[nukenerd]

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.