Law Enforcement to Use More Open Source Technology

Following the increase in interest from government for Open Source technologies, law enforcement departments in the UK have realised that it is also an ideal platform for many of their needs. Open Source does not have any proprietary tie ins and can easily be tailored to many different requirements.

Increasing pressure to spend budgets more carefully has led them to consider their options with Open Source. Linux, one of the top Open Source operating systems, is being considered by departments as a way to protect data due to its security and stability. Linux is still the highest scoring operating software in official government assessments making it ideal for national security. Currently the police database is run on proprietary and open source and the need to be able to move and change this data securely lies in the ability of Open Source to integrate seamlessly

Other European countries are already using the technology including the French Gendarmerie which has moved 90,000 PCs to the GNU/Linux distribution Ubuntu, Swedish police currently employ the open source database MySQL and in Portugal, the police use a traffic fine management system built with open source components.