The Open Learning Centre

"Often, Open Source is best – in our web services, in the NHS and in other vital public services. But we need to increase the pace and drive the principles of open source open standards and reuse through all ICT enabled public services"

With the launch of yet another shiny new electronic gizmo yesterday, it could be said (and it fact has been by my friend and colleague Max Cooter) that 27th January 2010 was a bad day to bury good news, but good news there was: the UK Cabinet Office released an updated and revised version of it's "Open Source, Open Standards and Re-Use: Government Action Plan [pdf]"

This document, first published in February 2009 and discussed at some length on our more freeform blog (The Open Sourcerer), has been revised and updated following input and comments from industry and community alike.

The foreward has been updated and re-written by Angela Smith, Minister of State for the Cabinet Office. In which, in the first paragraph no-less, she appears to take a swipe at some of the traditional/legacy software vendors:

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, he fought to keep it free for everyone. Since then, not everyone in ICT has displayed quite the same philanthropic spirit and a small number of global organisations dominate.

The document has been slightly re-organised at the beginning and a couple of points have been strengthened in their tone and clarity which we are very pleased about. Item 4 describes these changes to the Policy since last year.

4. This Strategy does not represent a wholesale change to the Open Source Open Standards Reuse Strategy published in February 2009. It has been updated to take account of comments posted on www.writetoreply.org. The key changes to policy are:

• We will require our suppliers to provide evidence of consideration of open source solutions during procurement exercises – if this evidence is not provided, bidders are likely to be disqualified from the procurement.
• Where a ‘perpetual licence’ has been purchased from a proprietary supplier (which gives the appearance of zero cost to that project), we will require procurement teams to apply a ‘shadow’ licence price to ensure a fair price comparison of total cost of ownership. We have also defined the shadow licence cost as either:
  1. the list price of that licence from the supplier with no discounts applied, or
  2. the public sector price that has been agreed through a ‘Crown’ agreement.
• We have clarified that we expect all software licences to be purchased on the basis of reuse across the public sector, regardless of the service environment it is operating within. This means that when we launch the Government Cloud, there will be no additional cost to the public sector of transferring licences into the Cloud.

This document continues to be a well articulated high-level strategy to encourage the take up of Open Source and Open Standards in the public sector, but unfortunately, it still has no teeth. One common request made by many in our community was about the enforcement of this policy. There continues to be, apparently, little or no appetite to monitor individual, departmental or regional IT procurement. Our own conversations with LEAs, Councils and other public sector organisations have shown there to be a mixture of reactions to the policy: broad acceptance, complete ignorance, cynicism and scepticism, right through to downright hostility.

The basic problem however is this: until this Action Plan becomes enforced it will continue to be a great objective, but nothing more than that unfortunately.

Additional opinion and news on this can be found with some of our good colleagues at Openforum Europe and Open Source Schools. Please feel free to add your comments below and/or provide links to other places where this is being discussed. The more coverage and debate this plan gets the better.

The Cabinet Office also has an aggregation of much of the comment and discussion avaialble here on netvibes. Please use the #ukgovOSS tag on your tweets, blog posts and other discussions to get noticed.