Open Source in Local Government

Tim Willoughby

LGCSB

Context

• Local Authority Termination of Microsoft Enterprise Agreement

• Potential for Open Source Across the Sector• Open Source Applications already in Use

Currently See 5 Themes

• Desktop Application Replacement• Desktop Operating System Replacement• Server Applications• Development Methodologies• Data Services

Everyone else is using Open source…..

• More than half of all web servers (>91 million) run Apache (Netcraft, September, 2008)

• ~2.0 million total Alfresco downloads (Alfresco, October, 2008)

• 1.4 million Drupal downloads last year (July 2007 – June 2008)

• 2.5 million articles (in English alone) on wikipedia, the world's 8th busiest web site according to Alexa (October, 2008)

• 4 million blogs hosted on wordpress.com which Alexa ranks as #28 (October, 2008)

• Drupal and Joomla web sites handle more traffic than 17 of the Fortune 20 corporate sites (Burton Group, 2008)

OS

Database

Web/App Server

Developer Tools

Applications

Cloud/SAAS

Ope

n So

urce

Understand the French Definition of Gratis v Libre

The Dual Open Source Approach

• This approach offers the most potential to Local Government.• There are certain products in the Open Source Arena that follow the Dual

Approach• Alfresco - Web Site Development and Presentation• eGroupware - Mail / Calendar / Contacts / Helpdesk• SugarCRM – CRM application• MySQL• ... And many more

• Each of these solutions offer an Enterprise Application which costs similar or in the case of CRM more than the equivalent proprietary product

• Each also offer a Community product which has no cost for the license, however, the costs for support, maintenance and bug fixes can be very high.

• The only way to counteract this cost Risk is to become an active part of the community or share the risk across the whole Local Government Community

Why Consider Alternatives for Office Automation

• Ease of access • Ability to collaborate • Open Platform (PC, Mac & Linux

Compatibility)• Open Standard - Open Document Format - • Cost! MS Office 2007 / 2010 is €149 - €550

per license.

Open Source Research and Learning to date

• The Open Source Community is out there• There are Many, Many Open Source solutions• Open Source Successful projects are based around

communities.• The route to success for Local Authorities is to mimic the

Open Source Community model• There is an Opportunity now to look to adopt Open Source

License

• There are upward of 71 open source licenses which fall into 3 families:

• Give me credit • Give me fixes • Give me everything

• We do have to understand the differences and the potentials.

• Low cost and scalable infrastructure (Linux, MySQL, Apache)

• Quality software available at no licenses cost • Key software components available for

integration • Can make changes to Open source code for

extra value • Development and run time environments for

fast and iterative deployments (PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails)

• Communities for instant help and fast innovation cycles

• Open Source as a Engine for Web 2.0

Open Source Lowering Barriers for Entrants

• Insist on Open Standards - Increases Agility - flexibility and responsiveness Evaluate Open Source and Commercial software options

• Can use a mixture of open source and proprietary

• Don’t need a separate Strategy— interoperability I migration considerations are important

• Like all Software Solutions – have to Balance up-front costs against recurring costs

How to Integrate Open Source into our IT strategy

What do we have to do?

• Understand the Community and Maturity of Open Source - Broad industry support are important

• Sustainable business models are critical• Healthy ecosystem of Solution Providers and Business Partners

essential• Establish policies for working with Open Source software• Educate company teams about OSS before they work with it • Implement a management system to review, approve, and track the

use of OSS inside the company, and contributions of company software assets to external OSS projects

• Understand Open Source Licensing – need to establish a process to help us understand the terms of the licenses and the procedures required to comply with them

• Make decisions based on both business and technical factors

Open Source attitudes and expectations…

Time

Tech

nolo

gy

Cap

abili

ties

Trying to keep upTrying to changeStruggling

Given upGoing to die

Existing Workforce

TechnologyNew Entrants

Pushing limitsExperimentingDemanding ExploringUse any tool

•Pavement Management System / MapRoad

• Open Layers

• PostGres

• Open Street Map

•Pavement Management System / MapRoad

• Open Layers

• PostGres

• Open Street Map

Open source in LGCSB

Map Data• Aerial Photography• MapRoads Road Networks• OpenStreeMapping• Routes, WPIs, Road

Programmes

Integration of new OSi Web Services

Time slider control to view Work Programme Items and Routes for a limited range of years

Work Programme Items by Type and by Phase

Simple Feature Library (OGR) www.gdal.org/ogr

Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL)

www.gdal.org

GeoTools http://sourceforge.net/projects/geotools

PROJ4 http://www.remotesensing.org/proj

Mapserver http://ms.gis.umn.edu

Geoserver http://geoserver.org

Open Layers www.openlayers.org

Ka-Map http://ka-map.maptools.org

Cartoweb http://www.cartoweb.org

Mapbender www.mapbender.org

MapFish http://trac.mapfish.org/trac/mapfish

PostgreSQL www.postgresql.org

PostGIS http://postgis.refractions.net

Featureserver http://featureserver.org

TileCache www.tilecache.org

The World is changing

What are Other Governments doing?

• The UK Government has agreed to: • consider Open source solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT

procurements. Contracts will be awarded on a value for money basis

• only use products for interoperability that support open standards and specifications in all future IT developments

• seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services.• Reasons –

• 1. Cost Savings - Licensing Fees • 2. Solutions vs Software • 3. Speed to Deployment • 4. Cost Savings - IT Investments • 5. Open Source Standards & Security

Conclusions

Can be fanatic or a zealot, but the show must go on

A growing number of OSS Government communities across Europe

Every migration to Open Source Software needs a change

programme and TCO to justify it

OSS need not be an all or nothing scenario nor the universal answer

to IT future

The higher the dependence on proprietary office productivity

software the bigger the task to move to OSS

Need to overcome the support issue