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Open Source Strategy Gaining Traction, Claims Minister

December 17, 2009

Simon Phipps - Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer - flags up an interesting ministerial disclosure on how the Government is measuring progress on implementing its Open Source Strategy.

Responding to a Parliamentary Question this week, Cabinet Office Minister Angela Smith quoted examples from ‘recent’ unpublished central government research which suggests that open source adoption is improving.  However the minister also indicated there was no central monitoring of whether the strategy is filtering through to public sector software procurements.

The response in full:

“The Open Source, Open Standards and Re-use Action Plan was published in February 2009 as Government policy-focussing on ensuring value for money for taxpayers. Cabinet Office does not gather centralised data regarding software procurement, as this is the responsibility of individual Accounting Officers.

The Office of Government Commerce (OGC) is currently developing guidance for the procurement of open source and is working with departments and local authorities that have successfully implemented open source applications, to share best practice and effective methods for procurement.

A recent survey undertaken by OGC and Buying Solutions (the national Public Buying Organisation) highlighted that progress on implementation is already being made. For example:

    • Over 25 per cent. of secondary schools use the Linux operating system on at least one computer.
    • 35 per cent. of NHS organisations (over 300,000 users) are supported on a Linux infrastructure as the NHS ‘Spine’ uses an open source operating system, and
    • All staff and public PCs in Birmingham City Council’s library services now have a mixture of open source and proprietary software.”

Our own research report, released in August 2009 and available here, identified 370 separate deployments of open source software in UK local government alone.

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Open or Closed? New Report on Open Source in Local Government

August 6, 2009

To mark the launch of UKGovOSS, today we’re publishing our new report looking at the state of open source software activity in local government.

Open or Closed? is based on research we carried out late last year to examine the adoption, perceptions and experiences of open source in councils across the UK.  Our thanks to the 168 local authority managers and staff who took part.

Some headlines from the survey:

  • 64% believe their council needs to increase its use of open source software (27% agreeing strongly)
  • Around half say their council will increase its open source use by 2011
  • 370 local government open source deployments identified
  • Software licensing costs represent 30-40% of some councils IT budgets
  • Why do councils go open source? 75% put lower cost as #1 factor
  • Office software is where open source will impact most in local government over the next three years
  • 65% believe perceptions of open source being ‘too risky’ stops councils from using open source more widely.

That’s just a taster of the report, which has been kindly sponsored by Bull Information Systems and One Point Consulting.  We hope this report is useful and welcome your comments on our findings.

Download a PDF copy of Open or Closed? here (5.5MB) or learn more about the report.

If the download is slow, try one of the links below:

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