Liam Maxwell, Cabinet Office director of ICT futures and the civil servant in charge of the government’s technology change agenda, has stated that open source and open standards are the direction for UK government IT.

Speaking at the Intellect 2012 conference in London, Maxwell commented that “Open source software is not three guys in a shed anymore. There are a lot of misconceptions about open source but open source is the future model for delivering IT.”

His words came the day before the Cabinet Office opened a three month consultation process on open standards to be used in the government’s G-Cloud initiative. The G-Cloud could revolutionise the way that government contracts are procured, moving away from the traditional model whereby contracts are signed for periods and years and then extended to an era of public ICT contracts that are measured in months. Speaking at the Cloud Expo conference in January, Maxwell said “I don’t think we’ll be seeing many contracts in the cloud services that are beyond 12 months.”

The three month consultation is a serious part of the process, with Maxwell promising that it has the ‘same authority’ as a consultation on a new airport.

With over 600 companies reported to have expressed an interest in the framework, the government is now preparing to announce which IT vendors will be G-Cloud certified.

Our thoughts...

OpusVL encourages anyone with sensible comments regarding the consultation to take part; we want as many open source professionals and companies and possible to demonstrate that open source is a key player in the future of ICT.