It's a bit like hearing Osama bin Laden enthusing about real ale. Or Ken Livingstone promoting sports cars. But Microsoft really is positioning itself as a supplier of open source software. As far as governments go, anyway.
Last week, the company announced it would provide national governments with free access to its most jealously guarded intellectual property - the source code for Windows. Microsoft's government security program builds on an earlier deal, the shared source initiative, under which it allowed "trusted partners and customers" a peek at its crown jewels. These moves won't impress campaigners for free shared-source software such as Linux.
But they may be enough to swing Microsoft's real target - public bodies considering Linux as an alternative to Windows and other proprietary programs, especially in big server systems. Pressure on governments to go open source has been building for several years.
The argument is partly financial - the UK government spends hundreds of millions of pounds a year on software licences - but is mainly about integrity.
Open-source campaigners say that such sensitive transactions as electronic votes or military commands should not be dependent on a single (foreign) company's intellectual property. Medical records are another sensitive area: in October 2000, the British Medical Journal argued that to ensure health data could be trusted and remain freely available to researchers, all medical software should be open source.
Governments have started listening. The EU's e-Europe Action Plan, agreed by heads of government in 2000, commits member states to "promote the use of open source software in the public sector and e-government best practice". This resolution was seen as an embarrassment to the UK government, which was working closely with Microsoft in education and key projects such as the government gateway, a hub for secure e-government transactions. However, in what may be the shortest official govern ment policy document on record, the Office of the e-Envoy and the Treasury's Office of Government Commerce announced last summer it was taking open source seriously.
The document, Open Source Software: Use Within UK Government, sets out five brief principles. The government (which includes local authorities and the NHS) will:
* Consider open-source systems alongside proprietary ones, and decide according to value for money; * Seek to avoid "lock-in" to proprietary IT products;
* Buy systems that interoperate with others through open standards;
* Consider obtaining full rights to all software code it procures; and
* Favour open source in government-funded R&D software. Apart from in R&D, where open source is the "default route", this policy goes a long way short of committing the UK government. But officials say that the policy means that government IT projects must take open source seriously.
If a system is available, so long as it represents better value for money and reduces a project's risk, it must be chosen. Don't throw away your Windows for Dummies books yet. Microsoft is deadly serious about staying in the government business and is likely to be a force for some time, especially in desktop systems.
Microsoft will argue that free software licences do not necessarily represent best value for money, that the general public licence under which Linux is distributed adds to the risk of using open source and that in some cases, useable open-source products are simply not available.
Microsoft is even prepared to behave a little like an open source vendor. Hence last week's announcement of the government security program. However, the full code will be available only to representatives of accredited governments who travel to Microsoft's headquarters.
Even they will not be allowed to modify software, only to "review and debug" it. But if national security, democracy and medical care are to depend on software, that's a good start.
