Not many members of the House of Commons public accounts committee are obvious computer freaks. In fact, after years of poking into the blocked U-bends of government fiascos, they could be forgiven for developing IT phobia.
Last week, however, several MPs showed an unexpected enthusiasm for open source software. They were quizzing the man in charge of Whitehall's shopping trolley, Peter Gershon, about the £610 million the government spends each year on software. The suggestion was that Gershon's Office of Government Commerce is dragging its feet on promoting open source to government.
Gershon, a seasoned performer, was careful to disagree without offending the honourable members. But he was not prepared to adopt the wholehearted enthusiasm that some MPs, such as Labour's Brian Jenkins, showed for Linux. Free software is not free to implement, Gershon said. There are migration costs, support costs, training costs. These apply especially as open source moves out of the back office server and on to desktop systems.
His colleague, Hugh Barrett, told a cautionary tale of an attempt to install open source on his home PC. "After three hours of struggling to retrain myself, I abandoned it."
And Gershon said that support for open source would depend on the outcome of nine "proof of concept" trials being carried out by his office (and paid for by IBM, a promoter of the technology). The MPs wanted to know when these results were likely to emerge, and seemed disappointed by Gershon's reply of "about a year".
All this may give the impression that Bill Gates has somehow planted a chip in Gershon's head. If he has, it isn't working. Overall, Gershon's evidence was the clearest statement yet of a government taking open source seriously. "There is no doubt that the viability of open source is increasing all the time," he said.
But Gershon is playing a subtle game. He also told the committee that he plans to re-open negotiations with Microsoft about the price the government pays for its software.
Gershon has already had one public run-in with Microsoft, over new licensing terms for Windows that would have cost up to £60m a year. Instead, the firm and Gershon's office last year hammered out a bulk purchasing deal, known as a memorandum of understanding, supposed to save £100m over three years.
If the memorandum was such a good deal for the government, the MPs wanted to know, how was a dominant firm like Microsoft persuaded to sign? Gershon wasn't keen to reveal his negotiating technique, saying he planned to use it again, with Microsoft and other suppliers. But he did say: "We are about to re-open negotiations with Microsoft to obtain improvements in the memorandum of understanding."
The committee went into private session to discover the secret weapon. But it isn't hard to guess the most powerful in Gershon's armoury. A threat that, from now on the Treasury will spend that £600m only on open source. That should rattle Seattle.
