The Great Government Software Wedge

I noticed the following news story (Tough talks delay G2009 licence deal) on a New Zealand IT trade site this morning. In short, the New Zealand government has wedged itself into a corner by not ensuring strong competition in one of its key technology procurement arenas - computer software. As such, its supplier, in this case Microsoft, can now rake it over the coals, and ask pretty much any price; the government as customer has nowhere else to turn.

For years, members of the open source industry have called for an increase in competition for the procurement of infrastructure and desktop productivity software in the government and public sectors in most western countries - many non-western countries are already working towards ensuring that they're not trapped in software price wedge scenarios by foreign software vendors, they're well ahead of us, people.

Echoing calls that we made some years back, we note that there has been increasing interest and attention from government procurement and policy staff (for example, in the UK) towards seeking alternatives to existing entrenched platforms and software. Failure to do so will result in government agencies being caught in a vendor lock-in scenario which will be extremely costly to maintain and escape from.

Specifically, there is a growing volume of system and application software which have become commoditised in recent years: file, print and email servers, DNS, web, proxy and other edge-of-network servers, firewalls, smaller database and application servers, desktop operating systems and desktop productivity suites are all now available in quality open source implementations, that support a broad range of operating systems and carry no licence costs.

The global open source industry strongly recommends that governments begin the process of preparing migration plans to these platforms over the coming years. This will be the best way of increasing competition in this space and ensuring competitive prices from all software vendors in future.

In order to kick-start this increase in competition, it may be necessary to take a leaf from other areas of government procurement practice.
To cite one example I'm aware of, the Australian governments already have it within their power to exclude specific providers from procurement bids, if they deem those providers are endangering the competitive landscape through a monopolistic position.

Exactly such a scenario was enacted by the Tasmanian state government a few years back. In Tasmania, the government elected to exclude Telstra (Australia's former monopoly telco) from a wide-ranging tender. The government realised that in a market dominated by Telstra, this kind of action is the only way to break the vicious circle which keeps other competitors out of the market.

Here's a quick and simple recipe that government agencies and procurement bodies can follow to increase the level of competition in the public-sector software market:

    Governments should determine the quantity of
    software purchased from proprietary vendors which
    could be replaced by commodity open source
    equivalents like Linux, OpenOffice.org, Sendmail and
    Apache where it makes sense.

    Governments exclude entrenched proprietary vendors
    from just a single round of desktop, server and
    infrastructure software tenders, to help reduce that
    supplier's monopoly position within the market.

    Governments look to specifying the use of open
    standards and protocols that promote competition
    amongst vendors in future tenders, rather than
    limiting choice.