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.'"

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:Is this real?

[Jake Benilov]

You betcha. The Government Service Design Manual comes from GDS [cabinetoffice.gov.uk], a part of the Cabinet Office. GDS also created GOV.UK [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 [github.com] under the Open Government License [nationalarchives.gov.uk].

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.