It's official: No 10 mandates 'open systems' options for Sir Humphreys
Whoops, there goes my budget
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Government IT projects must consider using open and interoperable software and data systems or face not receiving funding, under new Cabinet Office rules.
The Cabinet Office said on Thursday that from now on, civil servants must consider open standards for software interoperability, data and document formats and they should require their IT suppliers deliver systems that comply with open standards.
Government bodies will need to apply for an exemption to get out of the new rules.
The rules form the Open Standards Principles, developed following public consultation that wrapped up in June.
Departments that don’t comply with the Open Standards Principles risk seeing their projects getting kicked back for want of funding.
A Cabinet Office spokesperson told The Reg that the Open Standards Principles have been “embedded” in the Cabinet Office’s spend controls process from today.
“The CO controls are there to point departments in the right direction with regards to our IT Strategy. They provide a challenge and external approval function before departments can commit to expenditure, which will help projects from being delayed or reshaped,” the spokesperson said.
Earlier this year, The Reg learned that Cabinet Office was rejecting IT projects where open-source had not been considered as part of the tendering process.
The Cabinet Office said exemptions to the principles would be considered on "a case-by-case basis".
Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude said in a statement on the principles: “Having open information and software that can be used across government departments will result in lower licensing costs in government IT, and reduce the cost of lock-in to suppliers and products." ®
COMMENTS
Re: Who's definition of open?
"The key Microsoft file formats, i.e. the Office document types, are all ISO standards."
ahh you would mean the ISO standards that were surrounded in controversy after it emerged that Microsoft rigged/bought off half of the voting members.
Microsoft file formats may have ISO certification but they are certainly not open
Re: Who's definition of open?
The key Microsoft file formats, i.e. the Office document types, are all ISO standards.
Let's disregard the underhand way that they got ratified as standards, and look at the formats themselves. They are so badly designed and inadequately described in that even MicroSoft don't fully support them. Great.
Re: Who's definition of open?
Microsoft XML file formats are not currently the ISO formats. This is why they invented the oxymoron of 'normative variations' to explain the differences in their conformance statements. Presumably missing the 'non-' was a typo...
Amusement for geeks here : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff535095(v=office.12).aspx
That's also without considering application specific extensions and macros. MS might be implementing a strict compliance mode in 2013. Let us see whether that is the default.
You do not need the source code to implement ODF - it is based on modular use of other well known standards so is significantly easier to implement from the standard - and is a much shorter and simpler standard as a result .
Of course if you are suggesting that Microsoft included significant amounts of Open Source code in their adoption of the standard - in Word 2007 onwards if i recall correctly and ODF 1.2 is promised* in Office 2013 that may have some interesting implications. In fairness I don't believe they did touch the source code owing to the semantic issues that surfaced in the plugfests.
*http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-office-2013-odf-1-2-support-could-be-true-catalyst-for-openoffice-adoption-7000002689/
Lets hope they correct the file association issues that they inexplicably seem to miss on application install.
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