Europe eyes up open source

Brussels is flirting with open source - it's official. According to the Commissioner for Enterprise and Information Society, the software equivalent of free love offers an approach to technology long overdue in the public sector.

Sceptics may point to Erkki Liikanen's shared nationality and growing friendship with open source demi-god, Linus Torvalds as the real reason for the affair, but whatever goes on behind the scenes, one of the most influential men in Europe has come clean.

"[Citizens] should not be forced to buy specific commercial software to be able to have electronic exchanges with this administration," Liikanen said.

Can Erkki and Linus really join hands and live out this dream? On the face of it, open source does offer a future free from the EDS/Microsoft duopoly that has come to dominate much of the public sector. But when we reduce this vision to practicalities, the open source affair begins to turn sour.

If non-commerciality is the primary benefit for the EC, then who is going to roll-out this stuff? Mr Liikanen is going to have to create a huge European community of software developers to build all the applications and tune all the operating systems to run public services. A community of long-haired developers may be the wrong image - an army is perhaps more apt, and gathering new recruits in the face of worldwide skills shortages and public spending cuts is hardly simple.

In the UK alone, the trend of the last 20 years has been to outsource. IT departments are at an all time staffing low. All those who once worked in the local and central government departments now work for the big vendors - there's no-one left to fulfil Liikanen's mission.

In seeking independence from Microsoft, EDS, et al, the Commissioner may just wake up to find he's in bed with two other commercial giants from the wrong side of the Atlantic -IBM and Red Hat.