Open Source in Government and the Public Sector

The OGC has been using Linux to underpin the Government Online Buying System since 2003 in the form, of the "Purchase & Pay" system. Many other examples of Open Source within procurement can be found.

During 2005, Becta, the Government's lead agency for ICT in education, published a report showing how Open Source and Free software could make a positive difference in schools. The report was based on successes in 15 schools which were monitored for the report. Becta provide information relating to Open Source and link to the Open Source Schools project (http://www.opensourceschools.org.uk) where many case studies can be found.

Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, Ireland:

The hospital has projected savings of £8 million as a result of using OSS. These were mainly due to an elimination of software licensing costs for an x-ray system and the ability to reuse hardware using GNU/Linux.

Suffolk College - Implementing an Open source email solutions for 18,000 users

The college’s considerable population consists of one thousand academic and seventeen thousand student users.

The staff mailboxes were held on a Microsoft Exchange email system, which was proving unreliable and difficult to maintain. Students had little or no access to email facilities.

The requirement was to provide a system that was (1) scalable, and (2) integrated into the college's existing network with little or no disruption. On the scalability side, it was envisaged that more features would be needed to be added to the college's email system, including secure IMAP access, mailing lists and web access. Both open source and closed source solutions were considered.

Ministry of Defence (MoD) - Defence Academy

OSS was chosen on the basis of functionality (to meet requirements) rather than to reduce costs. However, its use has led to lower licensing costs, lower consultancy rates for developers and faster development times. The software used was security accredited by the MoD.