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Story: Green Party urges EU to go open-source

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What a rediculous comment from Intellect: "According to the group, increasing use of open source software development by governments could have a negative impact on competition for contracts, the quality of the resulting software and even the confidentiality of government departments."

Increased use of open source software would serve to impact positively on competition, quality and confidentiality rather than negatively as Intellect suggests. However, this may indeed have a negative impact on it's members - like Microsoft - where the current arrangement is heavily loaded in their favor.

By using open source software government can choose who they use for ongoing services, including improvements to the software.

Open source software allows users choice. If they aren't happy, another party (or parties) can be engaged to continue the work, instead of being tied to the current vendor. For example, if government is unhappy with the security of their software and believes that the party producing it could have done a better job - a fairly reasonable example given current circumstances - government could choose to engage another party to work throught the existing code base to make suitable improvements.

Another advantage is that having initially tendered for software, government would remain free to choose who continues to work on that software in the future, instead of being faced with the decision of continuing to use a sub-standard product because they feel tied the a single vendor, or going to the effort of moving to another similar product.

Of course, with choice and competition come lower prices and the need for vendors to justify their products and services. This is never good for the vendor if the vendor has in the past had a monopoly on the supply of such software. Then again, if government can get better service and prices through improved competition, that should be what government is interested in.

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