Open source in government, and where to start

There's a growing movement pushing for governments to use and produce more open source software. Incidents like the NHS's National Programme for IT and Becta's software procurement procedures have done little for the public sector's reputation in IT projects in the UK. Open source advocates see the development and use of free and open source software within government as one of the solutions to this problem, but then, as Mandy Rice-Davies had it "they would, wouldn't they?".

As it happens, open source is a good choice for public sector software on technical, financial and philosophical levels. The zero acquisition cost and lack of per-seat licensing must surely appeal to cash-strapped councils and central government departments. After all, the French police has saved millions by migrating to Ubuntu-based desktops. However, that's only looking at one relatively small advantage, and doesn't address the issue of project failures.

Aside from costs and licensing, one thing that software development in government could take from open source is its development model. Part of the waste of public sector IT is the duplication it produces. Across the hundreds of county and district councils and unitary authorities there must be an even greater number of software projects, all with largely similar aims and objectives, even if the approaches are different. Even if the developers working on those projects — who may be contractors and not government employees — choose not to collaborate directly on software, being able to see the structure of each other's projects would be a first stepping stone on the way to interoperability.

I'll discuss the benefits of open source licensing for public sector software in a future blog post, but even if a council or government department is wary of opening up its code as is, they could do far worse than have an open source-style forge, open only to government employees and contractors. Electronic delivery of government services is already here, but the more uniform the interfaces — programming or user — are to those services, the better use citizens (that's us) will be able to make of them.