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UK Government Mandates 'Preference' For Open Source

Posted by Soulskill on from the better-late-than-never dept.

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.'"

5 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Cost for software vs skill set by DamonHD · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    --
    http://m.earth.org.uk/
  2. It's not enough by Stormwatch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  3. Re:Is this real? by benilov · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Is this real? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Also, closed source and backdoors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.