UK: Government tightens procurement demands in open source policy
The government of the United Kingdom earlier this week published a revision of its open source action plan. Key changes are on procurement, the cabinet says.
"We will require our suppliers to provide evidence of consideration of open source solutions during procurement exercises. If this evidence is not provided, bidders are likely to be disqualified from the procurement."
The updated policy also says that when a 'perpetual licence' has been purchased from a proprietary supplier, which gives the appearance of zero cost to that project, the government will require procurement teams to apply a 'shadow' licence price to ensure a fair price comparison of total cost of ownership.
The revisions were made following a public consultation on the original plan, made public in February last year. "This Strategy does not represent a wholesale change", the policy document notes. "It has been updated to take account of comments posted on www.writetoreply.org."
A third change is related to cloud computing. "We have clarified that we expect all software licences to be purchased on the basis of reuse across the public sector regardless of the service environment it is operating within. This means that when we launch the Government Cloud, there will be no additional cost to the public sector of transferring licences into the Cloud."
Enforcing
According to a report by the IT news service Techworld, open source service providers are pleased with the policy. However they want the government to make sure that public organisations stick to it. Techworld quotes Steve Shine, a top executive at Ingres, an open source database company, who compares the policy with the ban of talking on the mobile phone while driving a car. "Until stiffer penalties were brought in, it was ignored."
More information:
Open Source, Open Standards and ReUse, Government Action Plan (pdf)
Open Source, Open Standards and Re-Use Government Action Plan
Document Actions
Open Source Policy