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.'"
Is this real? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Open file formats should be mandatory (Score:2, Interesting)
In fact it's probably a good idea if open formats are designed in the public sector. Either by quangos or by universities. Commercially standards by industry bodies are too easily bought.
Re:Is this real? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Open file formats should be mandatory (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to disagree. Most of the formats I see developed this way end up horrible messes because they hire a whole bunch of consultants to do the work.
The difficulty with that is that contractors are paid by the hour, so you don't get
* Re-use of other standards where appropriate
I've seen people reinvent the wheel so many times it's not true. This is true from simple little things like time values in XML (xsd:time sensibly uses ISO8601, this lot made up their own format, with ensuing hilarity when implementers think that their standard XML tool kit date / time types will produce valid documents), diagram formats (they just copied another standard verbatim into their documents rather than saying - "Hey, lets use this standard and say so"), and document formats (they didn't like the ability of XHTML to have script tags in it, so they copied THAT as well).
* Simplicity
Simple designs that work don't generate billable hours. Complex monsters that require hours of argument over the finer points of what they actually mean, do.
* Implementations
Implementations are essential for the development of standards. If you don't implement them, you don't get any kind of feel for the actual needs of the problem domain and how well your design is solving them. Alas, standards developed by publicly funded committee in my experience don't bother with this, and typically don't include any actual software engineers to tell them what problems they might be causing for implementers down the line.
Things like pretending an identifier is an integer when all the handling means you have to treat it like a string (it consists of four separate fields, one of them optional, but as a stream of digits and not bytes). Or taking a set of metadata that you have to understand to read the data, and .. embedding that data inside the data itself. Or creating an abstract data type with a contract and then insisting that people store it without thinking about it's concrete requirements.
Formats thought up by corporations at least have the benefit of their creators not wanting to spend as much time as possible debating the finer points of the thing. They want something that works, but as evidenced by MOO-XML, practicality often means they end up with a real mess as well - but at least it's a real mess, and not just a theoretical mess.
I think "Open" is more important than "Standard". "Standard" gives the appearance of authority, but "Open" means you have a chance of things being useful.
MOO-XML is a horrifying mess. Not even MS Office implements it. It's a "standard", having been ratified by ISO, but nothing about it's development was "open".
FreeMind is a small java mind-map program. FreeMind format isn't a "standard", but it is "open". And it is useful - useful enough that most of the other mind-map programs will import it. You can open the files up in a text editor, or feed them through XSLT, or consume them with a program and do interesting things with them. And if you want a feature implemented in it, you can patch the sources, and even feed the patch back upstream.
I think collaboration on trying to solve a problem benefits from some actual problem solving, rather than just talking about what the problem might be and how it might be solved if so.