In response to a question from Tom Watson, Government minister Francis Maude asserted that Government departmental websites should “wherever possible” use Open Source Software. This is very significant change in emphasis from the previous government, which merely said that open source and proprietary solutions should both be considered on an equal footing.
The implication, if this policy is implemented, will be departments having to justify not using open source for their websites should they choose to go down the proprietary route. We await seeing how this turns out in practice, since warm words from the cabinet office don’t necessarily translate into firm action at the departmental level.
Tom Watson (West Bromwich East, Labour)
To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office what plans he has for the future of the (a) Number 10 and (b) Cabinet Office website; and if he will make a statement.Francis Maude (Minister for the Cabinet Office; Horsham, Conservative)
The Government believe that departmental websites should be hubs for debate as well as information-where people come together to discuss issues and address challenges-and that this should be achieved efficiently and, whenever possible using open source software. Any future development of websites run by the Cabinet Office will be assessed and reviewed against these criteria.
Hat-tip to @glynmoody
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16 Comments
Interesting approach, technically it’s a breach of the EU procurement directives embodied in UK competition law to specify a solution in this way. There are ways round that, perhaps by building in-house or doing all the design in-house and then contracting the build using a restricted procurement, or keeping the project so small that it’s not liable to be procured according to the directives.
How they’ll do the work internally when they haven’t got the skillset and they’re not allowed to either increase headcount or buy in contract support isn’t clear.
It’s achievable, but it needs a little bit of creativity and original thought from the relevant people in corporate comms.
Great news – for the country (due to money saved) and for open-source geeks like me!
A rather naive (or perhaps dogmatic) approach, to be honest. Going open source, you’ll find a lot of very competent and inexpensive standard tools, but individual websites need to be built with those tools, and need to be maintained and administered. The open source world is not a charity, of course, and it makes its living on providing consultancy, training and relying on the relative scarcity of the skillsets needed compared to a certain well-known proprietary operating system.
Every procurement should look at the whole life costs of the application in question – and it may well be that the proprietary solution wins because the learning curve is so much less, you can take on staff at a lower level (or give it to existing ones) and still afford the occasonal consultancy day to get out of a hole if required.
@Renarde
From a procurement and tech management perspective the savings aren’t that significant. Licensing costs are far outweighed by the cost of support, and in most open source projects that I’ve had to develop business cases around the support costs are higher than proprietary products. There may be a debate around quality of support, but that’s not easy to reflect in the business case.
The other side of it, it needs vendors to offer open source solutions in response to a procurement notice.
One of the issues that this has is that the sites are procured by coroporate comms people, PR muppets and spin doctors.
And howabout government mandating that no public service computer should be using Internet Explorer version 6 by the end of this year… ? Talk about ante-deluvian infrastructure.
Anyway, the weasel word lies in “website”.
Most websites in the world are already hosted using LAMPS, Linux, Apache, MySQL, php/perl/python, rather than closed source solutions, e.g. based on Microsoft technologies using Windows, IIS, MS/SQL and ASP or .NET. Of course, with government, it may be that there is a preponderance of closed source, who knows.
But the important point to note is that this applies to “websites” which undoubtedly applies only to a tiny fraction of government IT. I hear no one saying that government staff are to use PCs running Linux with OpenOffice, or that general government data processing systems are to be Open Source.
Assessment: a useful step forward, but nothing revolutionary.
Julia – I doubt anyone is failing to understand that point. The issue with open source for websites is as much to do with escaping lock-in as anything; I think everyone’s aware that license costs make up only a small proportion of the costs for that sort of project.
Paul – wider use of OSS would be welcome, but we shouldn’t under-estimate the genuine problems moving desktops to OSS. The additional costs (e.g. re-writing macros, converting legacy formats, training) are potentially huge, as may be user resistance – which has killed many a well-intentioned move to OSS stone dead.
@Iain
All good points and understood, but without a genuine ambition nothing ever happens.
This sort of “we want to employ completely unskilled and incompetent staff, and hope the contractors won’t screw us over because we sure won’t be able to tell” thinking is how Labour managed to make such a mess of every IT project they ever handled. We would probably be much better off if the government stopped working that way. Skilled staff usually cost less anyway, because they get a lot more work done (factors of ten or more are typical).
When you accept the need to hire skilled staff, this sort of objection no longer applies.
@Andrew
If you’re costing a support function then you’re looking at how much ”availability” costs, not how quickly individuals fix problems. I’d also differentiate between in-house and external staff, and the argument about lower cost people applies on both sides of that, but you’re looking for different skillsets. Frankly Cabinet Office do not need support techies on the crown side, they need effective contract managers to deal with their suppliers of techies. Many of those contract managers would benefit from a technical background, and that is a very clear weakness of the Civil Service at the moment, but not really in that level of detail.
As an example, a project I delivered needed 24/7 support availability. The costing was per day, and the assertion that capable OS support techies are somehow going to solve problems quicker than capable proprietary support techies really wasn’t a factor. For what it’s worth the supplier of the OS system forecast a higher demand on their techies anyway. Essentially paying an extra £100 per person per day very quickly mounted up to nearly £1/4M pa.
Essentially there is no convincing argument for HMG in-housing much of their technical requirement. the article that Iain wrote the other day on IT policy touched on that but nobody other than me engaged with that discussion. Nobody has made a case for bringing it in-house so it’s all in the procurement cost.
The point that Iain makes about technology lock in is an important one, but I would argue that if the information and infrastructure are managed effectively and discretely then transition to a new infrastructure is eased. Even OS solutions risk some form of lock in, it depends on the design and implementation decisions made.
Excellent news. Every journey starts with steps, which is what this is.
Disclaimer: I make my living building open source-based websites for government (as well as a couple of Lib Dem MPs). I do this primarily because I was a civil servant for 10+ years, and became appalled at how much was being spent on websites.
This statement has the potential to be as significant as Iain suggests. But it isn’t about the underlying technology – Linux vs Windows, IIS vs Apache, etc. It’s really about Content Management Systems. There are too many examples of departments spending hundreds of thousands, millions in some cases, procuring bespoke systems which don’t then live up to expectations; or paying over-the-odds to design agencies still trying to squeeze the last drops of profit from in-house tools built a few years ago. Trust me – I sat in the meetings, I saw the invoices.
But over the last couple of years, there’s been growing momentum in government behind WordPress – yes, the same WordPress used by LDV. No10 and the Wales Office run their main corporate websites on it, with another major department to follow imminently. Most Whitehall depts have run microsites or consultation sites on WordPress. It’s actually a real success story: the UK has a very good reputation internationally for this stuff.
I believe we’ve proven our core point: that WordPress is perfectly adequate to run a modestly-sized website. Unlike most departmental CMSes, people actually like using it. Sites cost a fraction of what departments have been used to; and are usually delivered in a matter of days and weeks, not months and years. It has yet to let us down.
Francis Maude’s apparent endorsement of the approach isn’t a snap decision by the new administration. It’s the end product of hard work, by small suppliers and civil servants, over a two year period. It’s an idea whose time has come.
Certainly a pleasing announcement. Personally, I’d still like to hear ministers talking about free software, in terms of the freedoms they secure for users, but I suspect such philosophically-driven pragmatism is a way off yet 😉
Using Open Source whenever possible is a good principle.
@Simon
When you’re only talking about outward facing websites then certainly there is little issue, although the points by Julia above kick in. By putting any CMS in place you’re allowing the business unit to focus on content and not the build. My own experience of government websites was that it doesn’t really matter what the underlying CMS is once the technical departments get involved they distance the business users from the CMS and place themselves in the loop. That slows down any ability to actually provide the updates, a department I worked on a contract for used a WordPress website, and it still took two weeks to get information published because the one person that was ”allowed” to update the site was on leave. I’ve seen some of the work that you’ve done, and the sites themselves are far more approachable and useful than many, but the content is let down by the governance regime behind making information available to the consumer. I did actually try to direct a client in your direction several months ago, but it was not to be…
What you describe above is similar to my own frustrations, contract management in the public sector is inconsistent at best, and non-existent at worst.
Maudes statement does only apply to the Cabinet Office platforms, which as you already identify are predominantly on Open Source foundations. Tom was somewhat disingenuous in his question as it was him that directed that decision. Also these web services should fall well below the procurement directive thresholds, so sourcing them is reasonably simple.
Where it’s going to become a lot more complex, and where the points that Julia and I have made, is where the web platform is presenting a bigger or legacy system. Take the DWP and their Revs and Bens systems. Integrating a web presentation is likely to bring the project into the directives range, so open competition has to happen. For something of that scale a Competitive Dialogue is the likely approach, so a particular product cannot be specified.
Maybe I’m just not a good enough Lib Dem and should submit myuself for re-programming, but I don’t accept this article of faith that Open Source is either an inherently Good Thing(tm) or automagically the correct answer to these questions. Bluntly there are far more signicant issues that will make a difference, including, again as Julia highlights, the need for training and culture change with any initiative.
And for what its worth the Open Source debate has gone on much longer than two years in government, the first time I recall being involved in the discussion in 2001.
Let’s come up with a practical example that takes us away from the cost analysis side of things – while I’m pretty sure that free software has a lower TCO for most things, I don’t think it’s the important factor here.
Let’s think about this from an economically liberal perspective, of competing forces in a market. If I buy in a proprietary solution from a vendor, then that vendor will usually be the only person who can support, maintain and expand it. The vendor has little incentive to do a good job, because the worse job they do, the more they can claim for support. Since pretty much all vendors behave like this, there’s no way to choose a more equitable vendor – and small firms who adopt that approach will be crowded out of the market because they’ll be compelled to charge more for doing a good job.
If we use free software, even if we pay a firm to carry out the installation and configuration, then we are not “locked in”. Another firm can maintain it, a third can carry out extra work. At each stage of the process, we can make fresh decisions as to who best serves our needs as customers. Vendors have an incentive to do a good job at a reasonable price, and there is genuine competition.
Simon mentioned WordPress above. Personally, I’m more of a fan of Drupal – but since they’re both free software, if I chose to switch from one to the other, then there are conversion tools to allow me to migrate my content simply. With free software, migrating data (which is the thing you really care about) between different software stacks is usually fairly simple, or at least achievable.