An article on BBC News immediately caught my eye today, apparently the Shadow Chancellor (George Osborne MP) has made a speech this morning to the Royal Society of Arts in which he proposes that an incoming conservative government would level the playing field for open source software and associated companies, in turn making a saving of around £600 million of the taxpayers money a year. He also cited some examples of other governments around the world (along with several UK local authorities) who have successfully switched to Open Source applications at massive savings to the taxpayers.
It’s very encouraging to be hearing this kind of talk from the Conservatives, in addition to the EDM tabled by Liberal Democrat MP John Pugh in November, there seems so be much more awareness of Open Source within Whitehall. I am also encouraged by the introduction of the National Open Center, a government think-tank for discussion of Open Source use. The Labour government urgently needs to develop a strategy to utilise the awesome power of Open Source software and it’s associated communities.
I decided to write a short note to Mr Osborne to commend him on his, and the Tory party’s incredibly positive attitude towards Open Source, and join him in the hope that the UK can become “the open source leader in Europe”. I also note with some interest that Mr Osborne’s personal website runs on Open Source software, using the Apache web server to serve the pages, and the machine itself running on the CentOS distribution of Linux. So at least he practices what he preaches!
Jonathan
May 6th, 2008 at 8:33 am
The Green Part also have made massive pledges to Free Software
http://badvista.fsf.org/freesoftwarefreesociety/
http://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/3128