Atos Blog

Open Source Meets Open Standards

April 1st, 2009 Atos Blog Tags: open source
Posted in CIO Agenda, Firm of the Future, Markets, Strategy & Innovation, Technology, Trends |

Level playing field

The new policy’s main goal is to provide a more “level playing field” between proprietary and Open Source Software in Government. It goes further than its continental European counterparts by encouraging new procurement rules to ensure an OSS option is included in every government IT procurement. This does not in itself enforce the use of OSS because the value for money and fitness for purpose criteria will still need to be demonstrated, as with proprietary software. However the policy explicitly gives an edge to OSS against proprietary software when these criteria are fulfilled, “on the basis of its additional inherent flexibility”. This feels quite sensible, realistic and objective in its principles. Yet, the question of how we can implement the action plan still has to be addressed.

Open Standards and Re-use, the real winners

Interestingly enough, the policy stresses that Open Source is not an end in itself but more a means to contribute to the “wider aims of re–use and open standards” and it is indeed sensible to position the debate at this level. Open Standards, interoperability and re-use are difficult to argue against when building better quality and cost-effective systems for citizens with taxpayers’ money. It is also an area where proprietary software vendors can – and will need to – openly compete.

Another interesting point is that the cost aspect is not directly mentioned as an advantage. This is again wise as the value for money argument can sometimes be fallacious because of the potentially significant hidden costs that can appear in under-considered areas such as management tooling, application management, support and training.

All in all, it’s no accident that the new policy is labelled “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use”. Some may find it confusing but they are actually all interlinked. Although Open Source is no silver bullet, it bears specific characteristics that can help achieve the other two. Here’s how.

Open Source and Open Standards hand in hand

Even if OSS doesn’t mean Open Standards, the reality is that they generally support and help each other:

OSS

often relies on Open Standards to stimulate adoption and Open Standards are typically implemented first in Open Source applications.

The Open Source community has recently even been more proactive by developing new International standards such as the Open Document Format, which has in turn forced major proprietary vendors to open their own formats. Policy changes like this one allow these movements to be set into motion, promoting wider choice for the end-user and stronger competition between all software providers. It also triggers a new race for innovation and differentiation on added value rather than proprietary lock-in.

Open Source’s further re-use potential

Open Source Software’s common reliance on Open Standards is one thing. However, OSS’ re-usability is also enhanced by its specific licensing principles and obviously by the openness of the source code itself. One must still watch out for the diverse licensing implications coming with all sorts of

OSS

“flavours” though.

Even if this doesn’t ensure that it is easy to reuse

OSS

in larger applications, it does enable its technical and legal feasibility.

Bringing it all together: intra-governmental collaboration

This is one area, outlined in the policy, with high potential for UK Government and where Open Source Software has a power of its own. Many systems that are used locally in different areas of Central and Local Government are indeed similar in their functionality. In this respect, encouraging the collaborative development of cross-Government Open Source applications re-using existing Open Source stacks can be a good idea, especially if these common stacks are shared across all Government IT service providers, internal and external.

Existing Open Source stacks, tools and techniques, development methodologies and governance are particularly suited to achieving re-use through such collaboration projects. They have been in place for years to enable the efficient development of software by loosely coupled, geographically distributed teams of developers belonging to different types of organisation. This is exactly the same type of challenge that will be faced by cross-Government collaboration projects involving all types of actors within and outside the Government.

Work in progress…

The principles are now laid out and overall they make sense, but the UK Government will need to go further in defining how they want to implement the action plan both internally and through the vendors who provide much of the IT across the public sector. Among other things:

In short, there is still a lot of work ahead in order to make this policy a practical reality, but this first step hits the right nails by identifying Open Source as one of the tools to promote more openness and to deliver better services to citizens.