Open Source Blog

Central Government Policy
That attitude is exemplified by the UK Government's official policy towards open source, which takes a typically New Labour 'third way' approach that could either be left or right of centre, depending on your point of view.

The policy was last updated in November 2004 and states that open source software should be considered alongside proprietary software with contracts awarded on a value-for-money basis.

The statement followed a report by the Office of Government Commerce that led it to call open source software "a viable and creditable alternative to proprietary software" after proof-of-concept open source trials.

UK government sites participating in the proof of concept trials included Central Scotland Police, the e-Government Unit, the Office of Water Services (Ofwat), the Office of Government Commerce Buying Solutions, Powys County Council, and an unnamed Government department (see local government below).

While not a government policy document this report from the Parliament Office of Science and Technology is interesting in that it represents the information being provided to the members of both Houses of Parliament.

Local government
The central government has also backed local government open source projects through the Open Source Academy a national open source project that brings together numerous local authorities across the UK and has the support of the Department of Communities and Local Government's e-Innovations initiative.

OSA members include Birmingham City Council, Bristol County Council, Cheshire County Council and Shepway District Council as well as the University of Kent, the NCC, the Society for Information Technology Management, the Institute of IT Training, the Open Source Consortium, and Open Forum Europe.

The OSA is also home to the Open Source Laboratory, run by the UK's National Computing Centre to support the use and development of open source technologies among government and other public sector organizations.

In March the OSA expanded its online presence with new services including expert advice and launched a new Certified Open branding scheme that it hopes will enable organizations to judge the openness of their potential suppliers and their own internal skills competency.

Meanwhile Bristol City Council has detailed how it expects to make 60% office software savings by moving to Sun Microsystems' StarOffice software, having documented the whole process to pass on to other local authorities.

Public services
Not all of the organisations involved in the open source proof of concept trials have proceeded with open source adoption, however. In particular, the Central Scotland Police dealt a blow to open source supporters in August 2005 when it abandoned Linux and Sun's StarOffice in favour of Windows.

The police force moved to StarOffice in 2000 and later adopted Linux for a new Area Command office at Falkirk. It also worked with IBM Corp to adopt Linux for a server-based document management system to meet Freedom of Information Act requirements, claiming savings of between £20,000 and £30,000 ($36,000 and $54,000) over five years on hardware costs.

However, it later struck a three-year deal with Microsoft to migrate to Windows Server, Windows XP, and Microsoft Office, with predictions of 30% maintenance cost and 25% IT staff time savings.

The UK's National Health Service also flattered to deceive. When it purchased 5,000 licenses for Sun Java Desktop System (JDS) after eight months of evaluation trials for the Linux-based desktop system in August 2004 there were reasons to be cheerful.

The purchase was made by the NHS's National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT), now renamed NHS Connecting for Health, after it concluded that JDS "represents a viable desktop alternative for certain types of user communities," according to a statement.

Any hope that this might lead to a larger deployment of Linux on the NHS's estimated 800,000 desktop PCs was dashed just three months later when Microsoft signed a new £500m ($920m) contract to supply a desktop operating system and software to the NHS.

The nine-year deal updated a three-year corporate licensing agreement struck between Microsoft and the NHS in 2001 and covered up to 900,000 NHS computers, compared to the previous 500,000.

Although the deal runs for nine years, the NHS will have the right to terminate or renegotiate the deal every three years to allow for pricing and product changes.

While the new licensing agreement means that Microsoft will be involved with the NHS for at least three years, the door is not closed to open source alternatives. "The option to use open source software in the future remains and continues to be evaluated," the-then NPfIT said in a statement.

There was better news in December 2005 when Novell negotiated a £21.8m agreement with NHS Connecting for Health to provide the NHS with Novell Identity Manager for security and access control, Novell ZENworks for desktop management, Novell Open Enterprise Server to transition from NetWare to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

The deal is expected to save the NHS up to £75 million over three years, and with the NHS using Novell products across its entire desktop infrastructure, gives Linux a significant foot in the door should Microsoft fail to live up to expectations.

Education
Another public sector market in the UK is education, and here there are more positive signs that open source is making an impact.

The recent survey of higher and further education establishments hosted by Oxford University indicated that the use of open source is on the increase at universities and colleges.

The OSS Watch survey was carried out in February and March this year and found that 77% of institutions consider open source when procuring software, although only 25% of institutions mention open source software specifically in an institutional policy.

According to the survey, Linux is the second most used operating system for servers (56%) for both FE and HE institutions, behind Windows Server 2003 (87%), and while Linux is much further behind on the desktop (11% compared to Microsoft's 68%) open source software was seen to have made an impact on the desktop with OpenOffice.org used on 23%, the Firefox browser on 68%, and Thunderbird email client on 22%.

The OSS Watch survey follows up on a report published last year by the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, BECTA, which approved the use of open source software for primary and secondary schools.

The study was funded by the UK Government's Department for Education and Skills, and found that the annual TCO of a primary school PC using open source software was £691.92 ($1,282), compared to £1,228.04 ($2,275) for a non-open source primary school PC.

At secondary school level, the annual TCO of an open source PC rose to £787.32 ($1,459), compared to £1,035.70 ($1,937) for a non-open source PC. That equates to total cost savings of 44% per PC for primary schools and 24% per PC for secondary schools, compared to standard commercial software PC configurations.

The potential savings were enough to prompt BECTA to review the impact of Microsoft's licensing agreements with UK schools and consider alternatives.

Becta struck a three-year licensing memorandum of understanding with Microsoft that began in January 2004 and was designed to reduce the cost of purchasing Microsoft licenses by 20% to 37% while also maintaining the freedom to choose alternative solutions.

The latest review is set to examine Microsoft's subscription licensing models and the risks associated with non-perpetual licenses. An interim report with regards to Microsoft licensing arrangements was expected in June, but has been delayed, according to a Becta spokesperson.

Meanwhile, in October 2005 Becta published an IT infrastructure policy for schools, which recommended the use of non-proprietary formats for text, spreadsheet, database, and presentation documents. ODF was recommended for all four, alongside plain text and RDF for text, CSV for spreadsheets and databases, and HTML or SMIL for presentations.

Private sector
Given the lack of openly published policies it is clearly not possible to gauge the level of adoption of open source in the UK with any great accuracy, and while there are numerous examples of open source software adoption by small and large businesses, these in themselves do not indicate a trend.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the UK private sector is proceeding well in terms of open source adoption, particularly in areas such as financial services and retail, but that the country as a whole lags behind the US and Germany in particular.

An August 2005 survey from Atos Consulting and the National Computing Centre revealed that more than two-thirds of the senior UK IT professionals questioned expect their companies to develop an open source strategy in the next five years, despite ongoing caution about the adoption of open source in the UK.

The survey indicated that over 60% believe open source will either increase its presence in certain business areas or be a fundamental component in core IT systems, while 73% expect open source to develop within their organizations' IT strategy over the next five years.

The survey also indicated that over 50% of businesses have already adopted or are planning to adopt open source, and over 55% either accept or include open source in a tender. Policies to manage the adoption of open source are lacking, however.

Of the 41% of organizations that have already adopted open source, only 12% said they have a clear policy to manage the process, while of the 15% that are planning to adopt open source, only 4% have policies in place.

Vendor ecosystem
There are a number of open source services and training suppliers in the UK, including LinuxIT, Sirius, and Netproject, while a number of smaller vendo have also formed themselves into the Open Source Consortium.

While Xen is a definite UK open source success story having started at the University of Cambridge, XenSource decided to establish itself in the US, but the UK does have its own flagship open source vendor in the form of Alfresco, which is based in good old Maidenhead and has captured some significant UK customers including Reed Managed Services and Informa.

Conclusion
How is the UK doing in terms of open source adoption? The temptation is to say it "could do better" but that would perhaps be unfair. There are clearly a large number of open source projects on the go, and while these are not always translated into deployments at this stage, the tide is rising. In particular it will be interesting to read Becta's assessment of Microsoft's licensing for schools in comparison to open source alternatives. Given its assessment of potential TCO savings and approval of open source, it would be easy to assume that open source will become the way forward. Things are rarely that simple, however.

What have we missed?
This article is designed to be updated and enlarged upon as new announcements are made, so feel free to let us know about any projects, vendors or initiatives we've overlooked and we'll consider including them.

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