News : Open Source makes historic UK breakthrough, 22 September 2008

OPEN SOURCE companies have been granted official permission to supply software to the UK public sector for the first time in British history.

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Background : UK Government criticised for stifling open source in schools, 19 December 2006

OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE is being kept out of schools through government policy which "stifles innovation and locks users into high cost software," open sorcerers claim.

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Policy : Open Source Software, 28 October 2004

The key decisions of this policy are as follows:

• UK Government will consider OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT
procurements. Contracts will be awarded on a value for money basis.

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

• UK Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services.

• UK Government will consider obtaining full rights to bespoke software code or
customisations of COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software it procures
wherever this achieves best value for money.

• Publicly funded R&D projects which aim to produce software outputs shall specify
a proposed software exploitation route at the start of the project. At the
completion of the project, the software shall be exploited either commercially or
within an academic community or as OSS.2

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