26 February 2007
We received a petition asking:
"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Improve Open Source use in govenment and local govenment work places."
Details of petition:
"The UK govenment is one of the worst places for unskilled officals failing to seek sound technical advice about the best solutions in the IT world. I ask the Prime Minister to consider mandating the use of open software and open standards in all uk govenment work places. to ensure that our govenment is free from external control from software companies which may at any time withdraw support for products and file formats without any recourse or alternative source of software that will work with the same files and hardware."
Read the Government’s response
Government policy on Open Source Software (OSS) is available in the document "Open Source Software, Use within UK Government, Version 2.0, 28 October 2004". This is available from www.govtalk.gov.uk. The policy is set out on page 4 of the document. In particular the Government will:
- Consider OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements. Contracts will be awarded on a value for money basis;
- Only use products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments;
- Seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services; and
- Consider obtaining full rights to bespoke software code or customisations of commercial off the shelf (COTS) software it procures wherever this achieves best value for money.
The UK Government champions open standards and interoperability through the e-government interoperability framework (e-gif). This framework is available from the ‘govtalk’ web site. The ability to substitute one component for another removes the dependency on a single supplier and encourages competition - an essential for Transformational Government. Many authors of software embrace open standards and interoperability but do not wish to make their source code freely available; they should not be penalised.
Interoperability and open standards also support the sustainability of digital information beyond any single generation of technology. New techniques for digital preservation being developed by The National Archives require the periodic transformation of digital information to new formats as technology changes. Such transformations will be simplified by the adoption of open standards.
Open interoperable standards, however, are not exclusive to OSS. A policy on digital preservation, which includes guidance on the selection of sustainable data formats based on open standards, is being formulated by the National Archives, and will help define the standards for desktop systems. See the National Archives technical registry ‘PRONOM’ at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pronom