| Title | Dutch Parliament Urges Increased Use of Open Source by Government | |
| Date | Wednesday October 22 2014, @05:11PM | |
| Author | azrael | |
| Topic | ||
| from the stop-throwing-good-money-after-bad dept. | ||
The European Union's interoperability page reports:
The Dutch government must increase its use of open source software, recommends the country's parliament. It wants to make open standards mandatory and use open source when equal to or better than proprietary solutions for all [Information and Communications Technology] projects over 5 million euro.
The government must enforce compliance with its existing policy on open source software and open standards, the parliament recommends in its final report on failures of government ICT projects. Enforcing the 'comply or explain' policy is to become a [task] for a new agency, overseeing all government ICT projects.
"The government has already agreed to opt for open source and open standards, wherever possible. Only, in practice, this happens too little. This has to change - open source and open standards can result in major cost savings, but they also open the door to dissenting voices", the parliament writes. Such criticism is to be encouraged, and one of the ways to achieve this is to use open source, enabling outsiders to think along.
[...]The parliament wants the government to report the savings it realises by using open source. This is to become part of the annual business reports of the government.
[...]The Dutch government has been encouraging the use of open source and open standards for over ten years. There was an action plan, two government programmes, a board, an expert forum and a report by the Court of Audit, the committee's report summarises. "Recent years, however, have been pretty quiet."
Robert Pogson put a finer point on this:
The Netherlands, alone, has seen billions of Euros squandered each year due to failed ICT projects. It is so easy to sign a cheque and hope problems will disappear, but that abstraction allows a lot of waste such as paying for permission to run computers the government owns outright.
By using FLOSS, a huge slice of costs is eliminated. Better management will take care of the rest, but opening ICT projects to competition surely reduces costs and promotes local businesses boosting GDP and tax-revenue.
ICT that is a revenue generator rather than a cost is the pot of gold for governments everywhere. ICT should not be a conveyor-belt of money flowing to M$ and "partners". That's not the purpose. Finding, modifying, creating, and distributing information as efficiently as possible is the only valid justification for money spend on ICT.
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