Open source in government is not important

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:41:34 +1200

Labour’s “ICT” policy includes a statement on “Open software” in government, part of which is attempting to get two thirds of government agencies to use some sort of open-source software by 2015. This is basically what you expect from politicians when talking about “ICT” (or nearly anything, unfortunately) - they jump on whatever bandwagon/buzzwords are popular without any understanding of what should be done. Firstly, I would be shocked if more than two thirds of government agencies were not already using some form of open-source software already. For a start, it’s nearly impossible to use the Internet without accessing something running Linux or Apache. More importantly, it makes no sense at all to aim for governments to be using more open-source software. They should be using the software most suited to the job at hand, whether closed source or open source. What benefit is there in requiring open source? If they think it’s cheaper, then they should look more closely, because it’s often not. The same applies to being more secure. There are absolutely situations where the best choice is an open-source one - but there are absolutely situations where closed source is better. I don’t want government employees forced to use less than the best tools because of some ideological burden placed on them by someone wanting a cushy job for the next three years. They have a few other requirements: Software developed in-house will be made publicly available. A nice idea, but (a) I’m fairly sure that most of the in-house software is of no use to anyone else, (b) I suspect most of the software you’d assume was in-house was actually developed by non-government contractors, and, most significantly, (c) not all code is ready to be shared. If a government sysadmin writes a quick script to do a job, do we really want to add the pressure that it will be publicly available (and given that it’s the government, it’s reasonable to assume that someone will be looking at everything). As long as the software does the job, that’s good enough (in the “in-house” context). What would be worthwhile is ensuring that government agencies consider whether software should be released to the public - I’m sure that there is some that would be of general interest and where the quality is suitably high.

Open Source on Tony Andrew Meyer

Open source in government is not important