Should Government Agencies Switch to Open Source Software
With all the talk these days about budget cuts and government spending I am surprised there isn’t more discussion on the topic of governments moving away from proprietary solutions to open source solutions. In fact, the White House is not just using Drupal as their platform for whitehouse.gov, but they are also contributing back to the community.
The following benefits jump out at me when considering government switch to open source:
- Acquisition Costs – zero; simple download or CD install
- Security – source code access provides complete transparency
- Recurring Costs – zero; no license to continually upgrade and pay for
- Staff – younger IT staff tend to be interested in open source and can help recruit a new generation of IT staff
However, I do see some issues that can be used as a deterrent to switch:
- Support – do agencies have open source qualified employees to support various solutions
- Installation Costs – switching software is expensive as most government agencies are probably still running independent PCs requiring installation per machine
- Training – although open source products are easy to use (some of them at least) there will be a training cost for people unfamiliar with the new technology
- Lifetime Issues – how long will a given open source project last; does it have a longer potential lifespan than say Microsoft?
My lists above show that the switch is more complicated than the easy to jump to conclusion that it is obviously better because it is free. I plan to investigate this area further to learn more about how open source is trying to move into government and will provide more thoughts on this topic in future blog postings. Any information you have on this topic is greatly appreciated in the comments section and I would like to hear from government employees who have tried and failed or succeeded in bringing in open source software to their department.
Finally, my apologies to you the reader for not writing a blog update in a few weeks. I have spent the last few weeks moving from Florida to Texas as I am transitioning to a new company and position. I am the new open source community manager for OpenStack, a cloud platform initiative launched by RackSpace and NASA. I encourage you to check out this new and interesting project.
