Incredibly, they have both come up with the very same solution — if you can believe the coincidence. It is called open source, a set of principles and practices on how to write software for which the source code is freely available.

Yes, both the Conservative and Labour parties have revealed policies based on the principles of open source computing and, ironically, both are claiming 'ownership' of the idea.

UK minister for transformational government Tom Watson said Labour is set to embrace open source with its Power of Information Taskforce. He says there are three rules of open source: 'One, nobody owns it. Two, everybody uses it. And three, anyone can improve it.'

Then, before you could say 'make mine a linux', David Cameron was standing on his hind legs at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts telling how he and his party were going to revolutionise government computing with open standards.

'We will follow private sector best practice, which is to introduce open standards that enable IT contracts to be split up into modular components,' he said.

'So never again could there be projects like Labour's hubristic NHS supercomputer. And we will create a level playing field for open source software in IT procurement and open up the procurement system to small and innovative companies.'

He said the Conservatives were going to move from a top-down system to a bottom-up one, where money 'follows the needs and wishes of individuals and the users of services — not the priorities of the bureaucracy'.

These concepts are hardly new. Open source has existed in one form or another since the dawn of modern computing and there has been large scale adoption in the private sector since the mid-1990s.

Industry analysts Gartner Research has just published a report on the subject entitled The State of Open Source 2008. It predicts that, by 2012, more than 90 per cent of enterprises will use open source in direct or embedded forms and that this will dominate software infrastructure for cloud-based providers.

The report says: 'Users who reject open source for technical, legal or business reasons might find themselves unintentionally using open source, despite their opposition.'

This stating the obvious. Anybody who uses Google, for instance, is touching open source. It is already pervasive and embedded, so what both government parties are proposing is hardly groundbreaking.

Governments have little choice but to adopt open standards if they want their systems to remain relevant to those who use them and those who benefit from them.

David Cameron strives to unleash the power of innovation behind open source to improve government services. He cites MySpace and eBay as examples of information processing systems that could be emulated in the public sector, saying: 'These companies have grown because people rely on them to transmit information quickly, easily, cheaply and securely. Imagine if the information that governmen controlled were available to the public too?'

Mr Cameron added a proviso that this did not include sensitive information, but that which will allow people, both expert and non-expert, to create innovative applications that serve the public.

'We don't want to see Revenue and Customs posting all our private records online, whether by accident or on purpose,' he said, adding that a series of Conservative policies already embrace this open approach to government information that will enable both greater accountability and new services.

Despite the almost comical political posturing about who 'owns' the idea of open source, it is encouraging that these options are being discussed as viable solutions for the public sector.

Let's not forget the IT fiasco of the Child Support Agency. Maybe, just maybe, open source will provide the innovation that the politicians are talking about.


>>Sherrilynne Starkie is the managing partner of Strive Public Relations, a communications consultancy serving the Isle of Man. She provides her views on business and technology each week in Tech Talk. Visit her business blog Strive Notes for frequent updates.
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