Coalition Announces Commitment to Open Source and Free Data
The recently created coalition between the Conservative party and the Liberal Democrats has announced its commitment to using open source. It will be splitting up large IT projects giving smaller companies a better chance to compete in tenders.In details published in its Programme for Government (made using Wordpress, which is open source) it states that more government and local councils must ensure their documents are in an open standard format so they can be used and analysed by others.
Regarding government transparency, it lays out key steps that will be implemented including:-
- opening up government procurement and reducing costs
- splitting larger projects
- creating a level playing field for open source software
- publishing government contracts online
- requiring councils to publish meeting minutes and performance data
- ensure all data that is published is in an open and standardised format to enable all third parties to use it.
The Labour government had also promised to encourage the use of open source software in its previous Action Plan of 2009. This however did not really change the general outlook in government and proprietary software was still the most used. There are some government areas that have already adopted open source including the Greater London Authority who use Drupal to run their main website as well as to build other websites including the Open Datastore and the Climate Change Adaptation Strategy. The GLA have reduced their web site project cost from £1.2m using proprietary software to £150K by adopting Open Source.
