Some 12 per cent of all UK councils now use open source content management systems for their websites, with about 10 percent hosting sites on servers that run on open source operating systems, according to Kevin Jump, director of digital services firm Jumoo. He says that nearly all councils use JQuery, an open source JavaScript library adding interactive features to websites.
Jump based his numbers on using an online tool, Wappalyzer, a script that looks at websites to work out what software is being used. "You have to take some of these numbers with a pinch of salt, not least the CMS ones as many websites don’t reveal their CMS inside the code or response headers." On 1 July he posted his results of using the tool on all the local government sites in the UK. "For approximately 410 local government web-sites, more than 50 reported using an open source CMS. The number is probably higher, as open source CMSs tend not to reveal their identity in the metadata as much as proprietary CMSs."
Jump was one of the speakers at the 'Building perfect council websites' conference in Birmingham, on Thursday 10 July.
All arguments listed
According to the report by UK Authority, an online news site targeting public administration officials, participants in the discussion group 'Building and using open source digital services', compared their experiences on using proprietary or open source CMSs and other software solutions. The advantages of free and open source include flexibility, lower costs and no IT vendor lock-in, participants agree.
The news site quotes a delegate from an English borough as saying that using open source for a council website, including intranet and connections to back office systems, would cost between 20k to 25k GBP (around 25k to 30k euro), compared to around 60k GBP for a proprietary solution. The lower costs also eases procurement: "For the open source route, we would just need to get three written quotes, so we could have a new website up and running by the end of the year."