UK government is 'freaking out' about the potential of open source, says Red Hat

"Government departments are no longer pen-pushers, they're IT companies" echoes CapGemini

Whitehall IT leaders are "freaking out" about open source and are keen to use it to drive innovation, according to a senior solutions architect from Red Hat.

Martin Percival said government IT leaders are showing a growing interest in moving to open source solutions.

"The government has got more departments with CTOs who are now saying, 'We want to go completely [open source] and innovate to the nth degree'," he said.

Percival said some Whitehall CTOs are trying to "miss the middle step" and "just jump straight into containers or whatever - there are more people in government saying that than in any other large organisation out there".

"Government is freaking out," he said. "We've just got to the point where government has said, ‘There's a huge step to be made in the way that we deliver this stuff out to the public and to people in the UK that doesn't need that middle step - let's move on'. And those CTOs are very interesting people."

Clive Hackney, a senior engineer at Capgemini, echoed Percival's sentiments: "Government departments are no longer pen-pushers - they're IT companies, and it's all integrated, all systems.

"There's a quote, isn't there? 'Every company is now a software company'... Software is eating the world by the fact it is everywhere now. It affects every single business, and is part of us."

Percival believes security considerations are helping to drive the adoption of open source within government.

"The idea that open source is by definition more open - as you can look inside it - has raised, definitely, some ideas around security. Those who want absolute security need to know what's going on under the covers, and can no longer accept the proprietary way of having a closed-source delivery software," he said.

The founder and CEO of container networking management firm Weaveworks, Alexis Richardson, said fears that smaller open source specialists might not be around for long to support users are also diminishing, which again is encouraging government departments to consider non-proprietary solutions.

"What they really, really want to know is, 'Will you still be here in 10 years' time, and who will be supporting me?' Someone like MongoDB has to answer those questions, and I think they can. RedHat certainly can - it takes the time to build up that authority," he said.