During Obama’s campaign, he led a charge for the expansion of open source technology. There have been some mentions of it from some officials, but nothing substantial. However, over in the UK there looks to be a huge push for open source technology. Here’s the surprise, from the Tom Watson , the minister for digital engagement.

I love Watson’s common sense explanation of the open source initiative, “when it delivers best value for money”

There are other reasons mentioned for going open source, beyond the obvious financial savings an open source infrastructure could bring. First, open source isn’t bound by proprietary software, or hardware. It’s fully customizable, and can be made to fit the tech needs of the government instead of the other way around.

It seems to me that all of this is pretty common sense. Open source should definitely be the wave of the future for governments, in terms of software and networking. There’s no telling how many billions of dollars are spent by our government trying to keep up with advances in computing technology. With open source, so much money could be saved. Along with letting experts inside the government customize, and code the software to better fit the infrastructure.

Hopefully, we’ll learn a lesson from the UK, if the plan goes through.

[via: BBC]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 9:49 am and is filed under Computers, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.