Open Source - what's holding you back?
Has the time come for local authorities to adopt Open Source products more widely and thereby save megabucks on software licensing? Open Source is now well established and offers the benefits of sound core products that are free to use and supported by a large community of developers worldwide. The Cabinet Office supports its use and advises that all public sector procurement for IT systems should specifically encourage the offering of Open Source products. Many councils are already using specialist Open Source products – Apache web servers, for example – and a number are looking to migrate to Open Source content management systems which now offer superior functionality to proprietary solutions as well as zero licensing costs.
The really big savings, however, are in Open Source office suites. These have been around a long time – as Open Office, Star Office, and in cloud-based form as Google Docs, Zoho’s office suite, and others. Not all of them are good - so you need to be selective – but the potential benefits are enormous. Some councils have as many as 2000 office software users – cutting over to Open Source could mean an significant annual saving per desktop. Larger councils are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on Microsoft which could be better spent elsewhere or not spent at all, and smaller councils even more proportionally.
But at the moment there is an obstacle to councils cutting over to Open Source office suites: core applications such as the council’s financial system do not necessary integrate correctly with Open Source products. One possible workaround being considered by some councils is to provide Open Source office suites to the 80-95% of staff who don’t need to interface directly with those applications, and give MS Office only to those who need it, but supporting two separate office suites is far from ideal and reduces the potential savings. The solution to this - the one thing that would drive this forward to everyone’s benefit - would be the adoption across the public sector of the Open Document Format (ODF). If this were to be adopted by all software suppliers, interfacing difficulties with open source office suites would be a thing of the past. It would also facilitate the wider information sharing and interworking between local public service providers anticipated by the government’s Big Society initiative and in Socitm’s ‘Planting the Flag’ strategy for ICT-enabled local public services.
Maybe Socitm can help – by finding out how Socitm members and their organisations feel about Open Source and what their forward plans for it are, and by using its influence to encourage further the adoption of open standards, and ODF in particular, for public sector ICT. So, what are your views on the use of Open Source products on the desktop? Does your council currently use them or does it have plans to do so? How much would you save by adopting an Open Source CMS as a first step? How big an issue are integration problems? Would it help if government mandated the use of ODF by software suppliers, or at least strongly encouraged it?
Please let me have your views by email or phone on any or all of these questions and your suggestions as to how best Socitm can support you and your colleagues in this area. I look forward to hearing from you.