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

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: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

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

[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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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.