Open Source Software

Don Christie has a look at the politics of open source in NZ.  He finds a wide range of support for open source software from Rodney Hide to Nandor Tanczos, and in the blogosphere from myself to The Standard.

My original support for open source software tended to be more grumpiness at the price of propriety software.  But in recent years it has been far more admiration of the innovation it encourages.  Firefox and WordPress are both great examples of this, with hundreds of cool plugins produced by third parties.

The e-govt unit of SSC is pretty open source friendly and many online projects use open source software.  However as far as I know, open source is not used for the core functions of any Government agency.

One or two European countries have, if I recall correctly, taken most of their Government away from a Microsoft platform to an open source platform.  I think it is highly unlikely that would ever happen in NZ.

However what would be a useful thing to do, would be to have say one or two small Departments or Ministries (such as Consumer Affairs or Youth Affairs) move to an open source platform for say a period of at least three years.  Then at the end of the three years, one could do a cost vs benefit report of how it went, which could be considered by other parts of Government.

There would be undoubted challenges, such as staff familiarity with software, training, compatibility etc.  But they might not be as large as people think.