NL: Police forces to use open source software 'where possible'

"That wrongly implied that we had decided to only use open source", said Fred Kluit, spokesperson at Vtspn, the support organisation for all of the Dutch police districts and departments.

According to Kluit, the Dutch police will use open source software wherever this is technically feasible and where it meets the functional and technical requirements of the police departments. Exceptions on the new policy will be made for instance when using open source would negatively influence the police work. "It is important, but not our first priority to save costs by moving to open source."

According to the spokesperson, the current IT infrastructure allows moving to open source. The decision is also is in line with the country's national IT policy. "Like almost all other IT-organisations, over the past decades we started using many Windows-based systems. However, our current policy is to prefer open source."

Production

Kluit says the police has been using Linux since 2005, mostly in test and development environments. "The deal with Red Hat will allows us to increase the number of Linux servers from thirty to six hundred servers, to be used in development, testing and production."

Next, the police forces will use an open source application server, which will help to manage the reports submitted to the police over the Internet. "We're looking at all parts of our forces, to see if there are components that we can replace by open source software."

The Dutch police forces encompasses 60,000 employees in 25 police districts and in the national police force.

GNU/Linux distributor Red Hat on 6 October announced its agreement with the Vtspn regarding two versions of its open source operating system. One of these will be used to manage the expanding number of the other Linux servers.

Questions on the Police's IT policy regarding open source were raised by the Dutch parliament in March, following a tender published by Vtspn that requested 30,000 Windows-based terminals. In June the minister of the Interior replied the police should not have written Windows-based, as it did not intend to discriminate other operating systems. The Vtspn later added that at least part of the thin clients will be running Linux.

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