Open source hope for public services

Open source software is gaining ground in local government and may be the key to overcoming integration issues, say experts.

The technology may be on the brink of its first big central government win (see last week's Computing).

But the key area for local government is back office integration, says Martin Ferguson, egovernment advisor for local authority consultation group the Improvement and Development Agency.

'Open source will be central to unlocking integration and that is where it will really make its mark,' he said.

'Local government has been waiting for a national solution to integration. All the concepts delivered so far have been expensive and not workable. But we know some local authorities are making progress with open source,' he said.

North Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council is trialling open source desktop software StarOffice. If successful, the council will roll out the software to all 2500 staff, and make a saving of £300,000 - two-thirds of its current licence costs.

Cost is the prime consideration, says North Tyneside MBC business development manager Duncan Olive.

'Changes in Microsoft's support agreement mean the upgrade path is now removed so there is a considerable cost saving with StarOffice.

'We have looked at this before but the software has now reached maturity and offers the same kinds of benefits as Microsoft,' said Olive.

Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council is the first local authority to meet the government's 2005 deadline for online services. A quarter of its systems are open source and the technology was central to hitting the target, says head of IT Tim Rainey.

'There was a lack of suitable products - the usual local government software providers hadn't caught up, so we had to be pro-active and develop ourselves.

'We also didn't want to get stuck with a single big application, we wanted to be sure we had products that met our needs as opposed to what suppliers think we want.'

The council uses open source products - Linux, MySQL, Apache - and also bespoke applications built on software downloaded from the internet.