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 ICT 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 tasks 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.
Wasting money
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 report was made public on Wednesday. The text was compiled by a temporary committee on government ICT projects. This committee concludes that failures of government ICT projects have led to an unnecessary waste of taxpayers’ money.
The committee members examined several ICT projects, hoping to find a common factor or pattern of mistakes from which lessons can be learned to prevent such failures in the future. “The problem as a whole is intractable and will never be brought fully under control”, the committee concludes.
All quiet
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.”
More information:
Parliamentary committee report on failurs of government ICT projects (in Dutch)
Parliamentary committee presents report on failures of government ICT projects
Binnenlandsbestuur news item (in Dutch)
'Comply or explain" policy on open standards and open source (in Dutch)
CISR news item