UK Government Mandates 'Preference' For Open Source 123
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.'"
It's only a suggestion, not a mandate (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (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.
Openness is the customer requirement (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (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.
Re:It's not enough (Score:4, Insightful)
Open Source cannot compete on bribes with proprietary software
Fix'd.
Also, closed source and backdoors (Score:5, Insightful)
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:It's not enough (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.