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If IT buyers across Whitehall are to play their part in saving the government £30bn and supporting small and medium-sized businesses, as set out in this year's Budget, they need to start thinking about open source software, says Mark Taylor, president of the Open Source Consortium.
Last week, Alistair Darling made it clear we are entering a new era of thrift in the public sector as the effects of the global credit crunch feed through to the wider economy. Indeed, it must. But how does Whitehall start tackling the estimated £7.5bn dent in its finances without adversely effecting frontline services? Well, how about tackling the massive bill it pays for software?
Nowhere else would departments or their agencies tolerate a monopoly or a monoculture. Imagine if every department decided, as policy, to buy its hardware from the same supplier. Of course, innovation wouldn’t stop, but the pace would slow and the price would rocket.
But that is exactly where we are with software.
Whitehall needs to apply the lessons it has learnt everywhere else – not just that markets drive down cost and improve quality but that markets require fostering with deal flow and encouragement for suppliers to keep competing for work.
We do not expect proprietary software to disappear from the public sector. We don’t even expect, in the short-term, that there will be a massive shift away from current suppliers to a more heterogeneous world. But we do think that unless Whitehall acts to create a mixed market in supply then long term savings will be impossible to deliver.
The open source business model is a different one from the proprietary model that currently dominates. And we think those differences mean even a relatively small use of open source will drive big changes that benefit purchasers and ultimately the public.
The key insight of the open source model is that the software you use should be yours to control and customise. It’s not a new concept: the internet depends on open source to direct you to the site you want to see. And the open protocols that carry almost all network traffic have driven out proprietary alternatives not because of heavy-handed marketing but precisely because they are open and so strengthened by peer review.
Open source is big business: the Linux operating system, at the core of so many open source projects, might have been started in a student’s bedroom, but today it is at the heart of a multi-billion dollar industry that is revolutionising IT.
We have already seen this in the private sector. Moving to new software solutions based on the open source business model is saving Specsavers, Europe's fastest growing opticians’ group, hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in licensing alone.
Yes, there are costs of transition from one set of software to another, but they are broadly comparable to the familiar cycle of software upgrades that proprietary users have to face every two to five years. The difference is that open source delivers year on year savings once we've got over the hump of the software upgrade.
Bringing those benefits to the public sector might require taking what seem counter-intuitive decisions. The first thing that the big firms do when they hear you are considering opting for a more diverse range of suppliers is pitch up at your door offering big discounts.
But, like the offers in the summer sales, the discounts offered one day are recouped by mark-ups sought at a later date and, particularly when the purchasers are big central departments, purchasing decisions need to be made in the general interest of the taxpayer, not simply on the basis of who is offering the cheapest price on that one day.
And the supplier lock-in does more than keep costs high, it stifles innovation.
The only way to deliver long-term cost savings and sustainable quality improvements will be to actively sponsor some biodiversity in the software world.
Whitehall is often criticised for its aversion to risk as oppose to its willingness to manage it. But the real risk is to continue to rely on a monopoly supplier when the public rightly expect that use of information technology should be delivering better services at lower cost. Open source, open protocols and open data formats can be the key to delivering just that.
For more information visit www.opensourceconsortium.org
© 2008 Whitehall & Westminster World. Original article
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