Open-source software would help improve the government's poor record on IT
If I were to say to you "UK government" and "major IT project", chances are you'd run for cover. As any devoted Private Eye reader knows, the government has a poor record with public sector IT, even though it spends more than any other country in Europe on information and communications technology (ICT) - over £12bn a year. But isn't it time we stopped simply pointing and laughing?
There is no easy answer. The history of public sector IT is one of government soul-searching. That history has been punctuated by wide-ranging reviews: the McCartney report of 2000, and the numerous other reports from the Commons public accounts committee, National Audit Office or Office of Government Commerce (OGC) that have emerged in the intervening years.
One thing about UK IT policy that is beginning to trouble a growing number of politicians and stakeholders is the public sector's sweeping disregard for open-source software. Such software, where the source code is readily available for anyone to read and modify, makes sense for the public sector. Employing open-source would represent a significant cost saving for government - the Conservative Party has estimated (conservatively) that we could save £700m a year if we directed our ICT spend to open-source software.
This is not simply because the software is often lower-cost: the availability of source code for government applications will mean that the market for modifying and extending these applications is open to all comers, and not just the company originally contracted in.
Commissioning open-source software ensures that the building blocks of the information society belong to all of us. Done right, adopting open-source software would encourage highly skilled, highly paid, ahem, "British jobs for British people".
The government knows this. In 2004, the OGC concluded that open-source software was a viable and credible alternative to proprietary solutions, and should be considered, as these products are, on a value-for-money basis. So goes the theory; in practice, Whitehall procurement culture presents a very real barrier to open-source in government IT. This has a great deal to do with civil servants picking big-brand consultants they know they can blame when things go wrong.
Open-source would not heal public sector IT in and of itself. As Alan Cox, one of the UK's most respected open-source coders, put it to a recent gathering of Westminster types: "Open-source is a tool, not a solution. A large number of software projects fail because they were designed wrongly. Open-source would not have saved the NHS project."
But allowing open-source to compete with the big proprietary players might inject into Whitehall a much-needed level of "under-the-bonnet" awareness. Then, at least, we could learn from our mistakes.
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