Devil's Advocate: The government source

If open source is to make commercial inroads it needs a few prominent standard bearers. Martin Brampton as been looking at the co-operation that's going on...

Struggles with IT seem to characterise the government sector. Collaboration between the many organisations that comprise the sector is desirable but hard to implement. Maybe open source has something special to offer government.

Collaborative development is illustrated by a bunch of 35 councils making up the Local Authority Shareware Club. Its latest effort is the launch of a CRM system originally developed by the London Borough of Newham. Spreading the load, Belfast City Council is adapting the software for more general use.

The trouble with collaboration is that it takes a lot of organising. The more parties involved, the more difficult it becomes. Disagreements are likely to arise. In the typical collaborative project, large meetings of delegates are held. Some say nothing, some say a bit and a few say a lot. The vocal group is likely to contain the seeds of dissent that may easily become an obstacle to full co-operation.

Good reasons may lie behind the disagreements. Different organisations, even within the same sector, have different resources at their disposal and different outlooks on the problems that face them. Holding collaborative projects together often becomes difficult.

Even among aficionados, open source is sometimes thought of simply as free software. Well, that is an important attribute. The Inland Revenue (they understand money, you know) is said to be thinking seriously about using Sun's StarOffice on Linux, instead of Microsoft Office on Windows. The general idea is to save a great deal of money on 70,000 desktops.

The ever optimistic Scott McNealy of Sun reckons the Linux-based PC could cost only half as much as its Windows equivalent. Given support costs are usually somewhat larger than software costs, which in turn are more than hardware costs, it seems unlikely costs can really be cut in two. But there is no doubt the large sums of money being demanded for basic office systems are becoming irksome to many.

A move of this kind by the Inland Revenue would very likely trigger a cataclysm in the software market, as Sun is no doubt aware. Numerous public sector organisations are toying with the idea of reducing reliance on Microsoft but most are reluctant to be out in front. If the Inland Revenue establishes a precedent, it is certain many others will follow.

Yet significantly more dramatic changes could come out of open source in government. The most ingenious part of the movement is the software licence. While making software free to use, it also insists anyone developing it further may not use the result commercially. It encourages people to put the developed software back into the public domain but again insists that this must be under the same licence. It is this characteristic that led Steve Ballmer of Microsoft to describe open source as a cancer.

Others might see the free spread of maturing software in a more positive light. In fact, it could be just what the government sector needs. Open source allows software to move off in different directions according to the needs of particular groups. The most successful developments are returned to the public pool, ready for further creative activity. No single body has to supervise what happens and many can participate in the refinement of software.

In the conventional packaged software market, standardisation is liable to eliminate competition. With much fuller use of open source, competition would be sustained, as software companies competed for funding to make improvements to the pool of publicly available resources. Their public sector clients would insist that as well as yielding software for immediate use, the funded developments also went back into the public pool.

Bold steps are needed to get the process started. Caution suggests costly software should be shared only on payment of a fee. In fact, taking this beyond the initial collaborators is often more trouble than it is worth. The way forward is to complete development projects in the government sector as open source. Who is going to be brave enough to show the way?

** Martin Brampton is a director and founder of Black Sheep Research (www.black-sheep-research.co.uk ), an independent consultancy providing research, writing and speaking services on a wide range of business and technology subjects. Martin was previously a director at Bloor Research, and has worked with IT as a user and analyst for over 20 years. He has been a frequent contributor to silicon.com's Behind the Headlines TV programme and can be contacted at silicon@black-sheep-research.co.uk .