DEMOS

Openness costs nothing

George Osborne has promised that an incoming Conservative government would create a level playing field for open source software in the UK, a move that would apparently save £600 million a year. According to the press he reckons that opening up the market in software would enable the Government to slash 5 per cent off Whitehall's annual IT bill, because open software allows users to read, change and improve its code, in contrast to proprietary software where a company controls the source code.

He makes reference to the fact that the Japanese government is moving its entire payroll system over to an open-source platform while last year, in the Spanish region of Extremadura, the administration migrated 70,000 desktops and 400 servers in its schools to open source software, saving over £10 million. He also suggested that "all too often, a government IT system is incompatible with other types of software, which stifles competition and hampers innovation. Like for instance the fact that the Serious Organised Crime Agency is ‘hamstrung by a mass of old, useless intelligence; 380 different IT systems that are incompatible’.

Open source and security are two things you might not expect to go together…yet there are some good examples of how the police and security services are embracing new technologies. The French gendarmerie - the French military police – is switching to Firefox and Mozilla's email client Thunderbird. According to the Head of IT the move to adopt the open source applications is to ensure independence and durability.

While Intellipedia (based on the Wikipedia) system, is currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, and has grown to more than 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users since its introduction. Less restrictive versions exist for "secret" and "sensitive but unclassified" material. Intellipedia is currently being used to assemble a major intelligence report, known as a national intelligence estimate, on Nigeria as well as the State Department's annual country reports on terrorism, officials said.

And lest we forget the Metropolitan Police Intelligence Division which established an open source intelligence unit.