Why Governments Are Now Looking At Open Source Solutions

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For the doubting Toms’ who questioned the use and utility of Open Source platform and it’s solutions, the recent announcement by Liam Maxwell, the executive in-charge of United Kingdom’s Information Technology Department lays the road map for the future of the platform. The United Kingdom

would look towards Open Source solutions and implementation, and adoption of open standards is silent reiteration that this format of software has indeed arrived, says a recent news article on Guardian.

While open source remains the most popular software platform to implement complex technologies that are cost-effective and easy to maintain for enterprises, individuals and even Super Computers, this statement by UK government representatives proves to be a shot in the arm, noted the article.

Liam Maxwell who is the Cabinet Office Director of ICT futures, announced at the Intellect 2012 conference held recently in London that, ”Open source software is not three guys in a shed anymore. There are a lot of misconceptions about open source but open source is the future model for delivering IT.”

Following his announcement, the government has opened a three-month dialogue and consultation process to establish open standards to adopt the UK government’s G-Cloud platform.

G-Cloud is soon to be the implemented framework for – software, hardware as well as services – to ensure cost-effective IT delivery and lower government’s operational costs, noted the report.

The consultation process will then select IT vendors, from the 600 and more applicants, as G-Cloud certified IT vendors.

United Kingdom is already in the midst of a digital transition involving some of the biggest names in open source as well as big data management platforms- such as Cloudera for Hadoop’s data framework as well as 10Gen for database management based on open source distro MongoDB. Joyant infrastructure support for G-cloud and a payment structure like PayPal, look to be future features.

Government’s across the world are now beginning to recognize the increasing capabilities of open source programs and government’s such as the French government announcement last year to adopt LibreOffice, the open source office document management software.

Asia too has seen an increase in the number of governments leaning towards open source capabilities. India, Singapore and Australia too have several successful open source platform services and are overseeing slow adoption of open source standards across various government agencies.

Liam Maxwell arguing the case of use of open source in government processes says that, “the uptake of open source software will increase once the government pushes open standards for software interoperability, data and document formats across government, which will help prevent public bodies being tied to using a particular proprietary software package. If you focus on open standards, and really fixate on having open standards that you base your development on, that then allows the best solution in the market to come through.”

The adoption of new and innovative technology by governments will prove to be open source platforms advantage.

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