The Liberal Democrats have hit out at the government’s failure to use more open-source software, three years after it pledged to avoid “lock-in” to proprietary systems.
The government published a policy document, “Open Source Software: use within U.K. government” in 2004, promising to consider open-source alongside proprietary products in IT procurements.
Contracts would be awarded “on a value for money basis”, the document said, adding: “U.K. Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services.”
But research produced by the Lib Dems shows most government departments use a minimal amount of open-source software, with the Department of Work and Pensions using none at all and figures of less than 1 percent at the former Department for Education and Skills and Northern Ireland Office.
Only the Department for International Development used a substantial amount of open-source software — with 30% open source. The Department of Transport’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency used 33% open-source software but across the rest of the department, use was “very low”.
At the Treasury, open-source software was used on 6% of the department’s servers, while less than 5% of software at the Defra agriculture department was open source, the research gleaned from parliamentary questions revealed.
The amount of open-source software used at the Ministry of Defence, Department of Health, Department for Communities and Local Government and the former Department of Constitutional Affairs was “not known”, apart from a single DoH library system.
Lib Dem Treasury spokesperson Julia Goldsworthy said: “The government’s performance on open source is shocking. It has reports from 2001 indicating the benefits and yet it has failed to follow its own recommendations and continues to engage in proprietary lock in with major corporations.”
“The government announced and re-announced these plans years ago to great fanfare. The sad fact both for open source industry and the taxpayer is that the plans have not been fully implemented.”
Goldsworthy is set to challenge Cabinet Office minister Ed Miliband on the use of open-source software across government — and its potential to produce efficiency savings — in the forthcoming parliamentary session.
Earlier this year, the Conservatives also attacked the government over open source when shadow chancellor George Osborne argued that greater use of open-source software in the public sector could save £600 million ($1.2 million) a year.
Elsewhere in Europe, governments are increasingly looking at open source. Last week, France’s ministry for education announced it had migrated 2,500 servers across 30 local education authorities to the open-source Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system as part of a strategy to avoid vendor lock-in.
In the Netherlands, the Amsterdam city government is testing open-source software on desktops in two departments, while the German city of Munich is migrating its desktop PCs to Linux.
