You would think that free software would be an attractive option for a government keen on prudence. But until now, the UK has made little use of open source software: programs which can be used without licence payments and rewritten at will, as long as each user's improvements are offered freely to every other user.
However, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) is unveiling an online procurement system that runs on Linux, the open source operating system famous for its penguin logo. It is thought to be the first major use of Linux within central UK government.
The system, called Purchase & Pay, went live on February 3 over the government's secure intranet, and is already handling more than 80% of the department's stationery buying, replacing paper-based systems. It is based on UK software firm Belmin's Eros e-procurement software, which is not going open source, although Belmin is charging the government only for added services, rather than for use of the software.
Eros has already been used within the DWP to save more than £30m a year on the ordering of forms and leaflets, as well as in other parts of the state sector.
Purchase & Pay is operated by the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), a part of the Treasury that works for better value for money in government procurement in areas including IT and construction. The OGC intends to extend this system to other kinds of procurement and to start paying invoices online - all cutting administration costs.
Last year, the OGC signed a bulk-buy deal on office productivity software for the whole state sector, saving the taxpayer about £100m over three years on Microsoft's Office suite, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
The OGC wants to spread online procurement across government, and sees this project as a trailblazer. "This work will give us access to valuable experience in the operation of open source software, whilst contributing to DWP's needs for improved efficiency and effectiveness," says Martin Sykes, the executive director of the OGC's e-commerce directorate.
The OGC has been nudging government departments towards consideration of open source for some time. Last year's office software deal also set up discounts on rival products from IBM and Sun Microsystems. Both firms promote open source software within their product range - IBM was involved with implementing Purchase & Pay - whereas Microsoft is known for its antipathy towards the concept.
Furthermore, Sun makes a cut-down version of its office software available free under the general public licence (GPL), the standard licence used for free software including Linux.
The OGC says it does not want open source to be used for all government software but does want it to be considered more widely. In this case, it made sense. "Our decision to use open source software was based on its proven reliability, portability and lower licensing costs. Overall it represented best value for money in this application," said Hugh Barrett, chief executive of the OGC's buying solutions division.
Open source software dominates the running of the internet. Web server software Apache runs two-thirds of the world's websites, according to Netcraft, a UK research firm. Sendmail email server software handles the majority of the world's messages and Perl programming language is widely used on interactive websites.
Linux is widely used as an operating system for web servers, but few large organisations have trusted it to run other systems. Even if you save money by not paying licence fees, you are likely to pay more to IT consultants for getting it to work - or so the thinking has run. Many big IT buyers are as brand-conscious as teenagers, preferring to buy something from a well-known company rather than getting it free from a worldwide group of programmers: this way they feel covered if it goes wrong.
However, the DWP is not alone in taking the open source plunge. Anglo-Dutch conglomerate Unilever plans to move all its systems to Linux by 2006, and thinks it will save £66m a year as a result.
Given the potential savings, and open source's "public sector" philosophy of working for a common good, it is perhaps surprising that there have not been more projects taking advantage of open source software. One of the few is Viper, a Linux-run system that creates video identity parades for police forces, developed by West Yorkshire police.
Legal issues have been problematic. For example, the public health laboratory service (PHLS) in Wales commissioned a program for monitoring infection in hospitals. Called InControl, it was taken up by hospitals across the country.
English NHS trusts were keen to follow suit, so in 2001 PHLS Wales planned to release the software under the GPL. This means the software is provided free on an "as is" basis - the provider organisation has no liability for errors.
But it took a year for PHLS Wales's lawyers to adjust a standard GPL to their satisfaction. "There was a lot of red tape," says a spokesman. However, he adds that InControl is now available to all users of NHSNet, the health service's national intranet, and has been adopted by hospitals across England. Furthermore, some are set to provide their improvements and extensions to the software to all users for free - part of the open source philosophy.
Greater use of open source is supported by Richard Allan MP, the Liberal Democrats' IT spokesman. "I've been particularly impressed by the way in which it allows collaborative development, which I think is particularly beneficial in the government context," he says.
He believes that government should sometimes pay more to developers for all rights to their code, so the state can then make it open source. That is not to say he thinks the government should "religiously follow one model. But open source has not been fully exploited.
"There are a lot of people who are willing to put in a bit extra if they are working for the public sector - it's true of doctors and teachers - but I think it's also true of IT," says Mr Allan, who used to work in IT for the NHS. "I think open source would help realise that goodwill."
What is open source?
Much software is "packaged": the user cannot see, let alone change, the source code, the individual instructions that make up programs. Furthermore, its use is licensed, and software firms club together to chase and prosecute those using their programs illegally. With open source software, users can change the code and use it free. The theory is that programmers all want good quality software, so why not collaborate on writing code and ironing out errors? This collaboration usually takes place online - and open source software is widely used to run the internet, with the most popular web and email server software being open source.
Links
Microsoft Office alternative
UK information on Linux
Site used by programmers to collaborate on software: http://sourceforge.net
