In a draft consultation document published on Tuesday, the office of the e-envoy sent its clearest signal yet to government departments that they should pay more attention to open source. The guidelines say that departments should consider open-source software alongside proprietary software in IT procurements and award contracts on a value-for-money basis -- a measure bound to rankle with proprietary software vendors, who increasingly find it difficult to compete against open-source software in terms of value-for-money.
Furthermore, government departments are banned from using products that do not support open standards and specifications, they will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary products and services, and will consider obtaining full rights to any bespoke code that they commission.
But the measure that most acutely touched a nerve with proprietary software vendors appears to be the rule that says that publicly funded software will be released under open-source licences.
"Essentially, if this goes ahead, it will force public-sector bodies into using software that is not appropriate for them," said the Initiative for Software Choice (ISC), in a statement. The ISC is an initiative of industry association CompTIA, which represents several hundred proprietary software companies, including Microsoft -- one of the most outspoken critics of open-source licences.
"R&D project owners should be free to select the licensing model that best meets their particular needs and public authorities should maintain the broadest array of licensing options when pursuing R&D projects," said ISC. "For this reason, the ISC strongly encourages the e-envoy to continue to promote a technology-neutral policy with respect to government funded R&D, and it recommends that any discriminatory reference to a particular software licence be deleted from the policy currently under discussion."
The e-envoy's consultation closes on 11 June, 2004.
Talkback
At last, a good decision is made by our government.
Will the next step be large government funded OSS projects?
I love the ISC flacks' comments... I wonder why they even care so much about what licence government software is released under.
And can somebody explain to me the logic behind how releasing software under a FOSS licence implies that this 'will force public-sector bodies into using software that is not appropriate for them"? Aren't they already using said software they've developed, regardless of the licence?
If they are serious about banning government departments from using "products that do not support open standards and specifications" and requiring that they "seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary products and services" this means that government departments will need to look for software to replace MS Office, or convince MS to give up the technical specifications and rights for their 'lock-in' office file formats.