Cabinet Office pushes suppliers on open source
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The government's deputy chief information officer has told suppliers that it wants to open source technology to feature in its ICT strategy.
Bill McCluggage met with suppliers last week to make clear that the Cabinet Office, which leads on ICT policy, wishes to increase the deployment of open source across government.
He emphasised that the government wishes to see the industry offer more solutions based on open source, and listed a number of approaches that it expects it to follow. These include: evaluating open source solutions in all future proposals; including open standards and interoperability as key components in IT systems; and moving towards the use of open source as normal practice.
The coalition has adopted a policy included in the Conservatives' pre-election technology manifesto to "create a level playing field" for open source software in government. It believes this will make it possible to split ICT projects into smaller components and deliver substantial savings.
There have also been reports of the development of a new model, to be used as part of the procurement process, for assessing the use of open source in government systems.
At the end of January, the Cabinet Office published a procurement policy note on using open standards in specifying IT requirements. It said that government assets should be interoperable and open for re-use in order to maximise return on investment, avoid technological lock-in, reduce operational risk in ICT projects and provide responsive services.
This requires the inclusion of open standards in ICT procurement specifications, although the paper says this can be waived if "there are clear business reasons why this is inappropriate".
This article was originally published at Guardian Government Computing.
Guardian Government Computing is a business division of Guardian Professional, and covers the latest news and analysis of public sector technology. For updates on public sector IT, join the Government Computing Network here.
COMMENTS
As far as I remember...
The E-envoy guidelines has long had a "consider open source" clause. The problem is there is no incentive for suppliers to put it forward.
This is the sort of conversation I used to have with my old CTO:
Me: This is an excellent opportunity to offer and open source solution
CTO: How many M$ licenses will we be able to bundle in
Me: I have put together a solution for all open source
CTO: How many M$ licenses will we be able to bundle in
Me: I'm not sure you are getting this. I've done a POC with completely free software that we have the sources for and we can make it do what we want.
CTO: How many M$ licenses will we be able to bundle in
Me: None
CTO: Our relationship with M$, Gold Partner Status, Software Assurance, Proven technology low risk, blah blah blah...
Telling the wrong people
"The government's deputy chief information officer has told suppliers..."
It's not the suppliers that want telling, it's their own CIOs e.g. Phil "the answer's SAP, now what was the question?" Pavitt at HMRC.
title
Very nice. Excellent.
I'll believe it when I see them actually doing it.
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