overnment and IT have often been poor bedfellows and there are numerous examples of government IT disasters. One reason for this is of course that when public money is wasted on a product that is not fit for purpose it is a very public affair while a private company can quietly write it off and move on. It is my personal view that there are no more poor IT systems, implementations or projects in the public sector than in the private. There is however one glaring area where government departments are very remiss and probably costs the taxpayer more than is needed.
There are two very different models of IT provision and development. The first, everyone is familiar with which is the for profit closed source software company. Microsoft, Oracle and Adobe are the biggest examples of this model. You pay a license and get permission to use their product. Some of them are extremely good. Some however, are not very good and there is an alternative.
The Open Source model for software development makes the software freely available. There is a license called the GNU Public License. This allows the software to be freely distributed or modified. The restriction is that the original writer has to be credited and it can only be distributed under the GNU GPL. This last rule prevents a company from using the open source community to develop a product and then to close the source and start charging a license for it.
A lot of the idea of the Open Source model feels counter intuitive, what is the motivation for people to develop software if they can't make any money from it. This brings us to the next big aspect of what has been termed Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). One of the original inventors of the Open Source model used a pithy quote: “Free as in freedom, not free as in beer”. Basically, this means that all but the simplest of software will need support. Quite large amounts of money can be made from supporting FOSS products. This is, once again, best illustrated by looking at the most successful Open Source software which is the Linux operating system.
Linux is based on another operating system called UNIX though it is emphatically not the same as UNIX which is a proprietary operating system (originally developed by Bell in the early 1970s) it works in a very similar way and is both robust and very flexible in a wide range of applications. It is however, sadly, not really suitable as a desktop operating system. However, the LibreOffice project provides a full featured Office Productivity suite. Indeed, this was written in Writer before publishing on the web!
There are literally thousands of open source software projects and many can be of benefit to government. In particular, there are significant cost savings to be made as there is no need to purchase sometimes prohibitively expensive licenses. Some of the largest database management systems can cost as much as £10000 per CPU license. The use of Postgresql would, at a stroke remove the need to pay this sort of money out.
Another less tangible benefit of the open source software is one of openness. The GNU license permits the free redistribution of software as well as any modifications that might be needed by a specific organisation. This transparency would be of considerable benefit to governments as they need to be as transparent as possible.
Finally, to take this discussion round to the fit between independent politicians and Open Source software. Independent politicians are of course generally free of corporate ties and so can be more clear in espousing the benefits of non commercial proprietary software.
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