Open Source Community Welcomes Government Support

The UK’s open source community has responded enthusiastically to signs that the UK government may be decreasing its dependence on large contracts with proprietary software vendors.

The UK government has a formal policy to use open source software “wherever possible” but this, and the similar policy of the previous government, have been regarded as “toothless” and Britain’s use of open source in the public sector is one of the lowest in the world.  

Now, as part of its cost-cutting plans, the coalition government plans to give a quarter of  its IT contracts to small-to-medium businesses, which may turn out to be a bigger blow to the big contractors than any other measure named so far.

Open source is in the plan

“The new administration’s policy is to promote small business procurement,” said Bill McCluggage, deputy CIO for the UK government, at the 360IT show in London, on Tuesday.  “Twenty-five percent of government contracts should be awarded to SMEs,” he went on.

McCluggage is implementing cuts imposed in the emergency budget in June, in which chancellor George Osborne said that all major IT contracts should be re-evaluated, and all IT deals over £1 million should be frozen until they can be re-assessed. So far, both Atos Origin and Capgemini have had their contracts re-written.

The new emphasis on smaller suppliers could open up more government contracts to open source businesses, according to open source advocates. “Eighty percent of the public sector IT spend goes to the top five contractors,” said Mark Taylor of open source integrator Sirius. In the US, by comparison, the top five get 48 percent of the government’s IT budget, he said.

He welcomed any moves to change this, saying: “There are no downsides to this – except for a handful of companies who have been making a massive profit.”

Free software

“Free software is an idea whose time has come,” said Taylor, at the Westminster eForum today, predicting that it would finally break through in the public sector because of the coalition’s twin ideas – cuts to deal with the deficit and the “big society”, in which the government will cease to do things that people can do for themselves.

The UK has a shockingly poor record on the use of open source software according to eForum speakers, and the public sector has allowed itself to get trapped into dependency on proprietary software. “Proprietary software companies love working in the UK,” said Paul Holt, corporate sales director at Canonical, the London-based company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. “They make more margin here than anywhere else in the world.”

Bristol City Council has a plan to use open source software which will go before the council next week, but had to back away from using an open source desktop, after five years trying to persuade other authorities to join it in using open source productivity tools. “We spent five years as the only non-Microsoft authority, but the dam didn’t break,” said Wright.

The city has conceded the desktop temporarily to Microsoft, and plans to use open source elsewhere. In three years, Wright hopes that increased use of the open document format (ODF) instead of Microsoft formats will allow Bristol and other authorities to adopt open source more fully.

The standards message just might get through, as it appeared in McCluggage’s speech on Tuesday: “We have a key direction of travel on open source and open standards,” he told the 360IT show.