Open Source for Government
From Granizada
For Senior Management - Open Source Software in Government
In January 2010, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced a policy that Open Source Software would be used in his city. Governments as diverse as Malaysia (2004) and Norway (2008) have made similar moves, among others. It is a new thing for high-level government officials to become involved in something as detailed as the computer software their organisations use. So what has changed?
There are three key issues that have into focus in recent years:
- A need to achieve better value for money, and lower overall costs. As systems become ever-more complicated and integrated, costs have become extremely significant as a percentage of total budget, with delays, failures and contract breakdowns common.
- A strong need for government organisations to have more control over their IT spend. IT procurement is often opaque, with contracts that disclaim obligations to perform and prohibit knowledge of the details of what is supplied. Government bodies require more transparency in IT contracts.
- A better understanding of the special obligations government has to safeguard state and citizens' data for the long-term. These requirements do not match the way software suppliers have traditionally worked, with short-term licensing and systems that are quickly obsolete.
Software procurement in public bodies remains a challenging area, Open Source Software is one option worth considering to help define risk and increase flexibility.
For IT Managers - Why Open Source Software in Government?
Public sector bodies are charged with delivering value for money for their citizens while acting in their long-term interests, and ICT provision highlights the tension in these goals. Open Source Software gives an option in-between the two traditional models for software in the public sector. The choice was either software controlled by an external company using commercial procurement terms poorly-suited to the public sector, or alternatively developed in-house by an IT department doing many things besides develop software. [1] Open Source Software is a third choice, a commercially-supportable option where ultimate control rests with the public sector organisation.
Open Source Software has a formal definition maintained by the Open Source Initiative. For software that meets the definition, there are three implications for public sector organisations:
- the value is in how the software is used in an organisation not in the software itself. This is a good fit, because public service has externally-imposed cycles of change, which in turn dictates a unique pattern of usage. Public organisations should not pay on the basis of a supplier's software change cycles.
- Commercial support contracts can be simple, transparent and fair since the technology is transparent. The negotiation is about what matters to the customer rather than what matters to the supplier, because the Open Source Software supplier has no intellectual property to protect. Worse, where a contractor is on-selling licenses for third-party software, there is a second unfair contract in place.
- Open source software is tested transparently. For the public sector it is important to be able to follow developing versions of software in their own unique ICT environments, and see the results of other people's testing.
- ↑ Specialist public-sector software tends to be an expensive amalgam of these two approaches due to the relatively small market it serves.
  
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