Open Source and the Draft UK Government IT Strategy
As widely reported, a draft ‘unclassified’ copy of the Government’s new public sector IT strategy has been made public, ahead of the final report’s scheduled release later this month. The original PDF version can be downloaded here from PSF while the Conservative Party has also made a copy open to comments online (powered by WordPress). Bear in mind this is said to be an ‘early’ draft of the strategy and not the finished work.
Notably, in terms of concrete action to take forward the Government’s strategy on Open Source, Open Standards and Re-Use, the draft report says:
“the Open Source, Open Standards, and Reuse working group will deliver clear and open guidance for ensuring that open source and proprietary products are considered equally and systematically for value for money. By 2011, public bodies will store and share records of their approval and use of Open Source software on the G-Cloud. The Government Applications Stores will hold Open Source solutions that are available for reuse in the public sector and by 2015 public bodies will review existing solutions available before going to market for new solutions.”
Judging from discussions I’ve had with the Cabinet Office, this isn’t the sum total of the Government’s plans to promote open source. However if you’re looking for a great analysis of the draft strategy, see this commentary from Computer Weekly’s Glyn Moody: Making Government IT Better and Open.
And talking of guidance on using open source solutions, NCC has a new white paper out, produced by the Open Learning Centre and OpenForum Europe.
Stephen Bathgate said:
The report sounds positive, although we have had similar statements over the past few years. We has also amassed a huge proprietary IT infrastructure which will be very challenging to migrate for lots of reasons, and I am not clear if we are considering retrospective action at all.
For example many IT systems probably have legacy proprietary components that have no budget for a rewrite. Yes we could (and probably do) wrap them up with web service interfaces etc but that doesn’t necessarily avoid the licensing cost of the legacy products.
Added to that are departmental IT policies platform/tools centric or standards centric? (ie interoperability via platform compliance rather than standards compliance). I suspect the former is more common and these would need to be amended to make maintaining parallel systems (eg Weblogic/JBoss) ‘acceptable.’
While the G-Cloud is a nice idea I would like to see more emphasis on simple quick wins with open source and open standards. We need some persuasive case studies and roadmaps to influence departmental IT strategies. This would hopefully nurture greater SME activity in open source support/development and ensure follow on initiatives have genuinely open interfaces.
Looking forward to discussions about this at the 2010 conference.
Stephen
December 3rd, 2009 at 9:16 am