Liam Maxwell, Cabinet Office director of ICT futures accompanied Cabinet Office minister Frances Maude, on a tour of Silicon Valley companies currently leading the way with open source and big data technologies.

Both vocal advocates of open source, Maxwell and Maude visited Cloudera, which specialises in the Google-inspired Hadoop data munching framework, cloud software infrastructure company, Joyant, PayPal and MongoDB specialist 10Gen.

Speaking at the Intellect 2012 conference a week after their trip, Maxwell was enthusiastic about Maude’s role in moving the government to open source.

"We have a minister who really gets this," Maxwell explained. "That's where the future is moving. It's moving to a new model of service and delivery, it's big data and big data is going to be open source. We are going to spend a lot of time looking into that. If we move to being one common government we need open source."

The idea is to move away from what Maxwell terms ‘black-box’ contracts, which involve large IT vendors, towards more agile ICT systems delivered by SME’s, which, to Maxwell, equates to open source and open standards.

"For years we spent on IT systems built for bureaucrats, they were not built for people," he said.

 Our thoughts...

We're delighted to hear that this level of government understands open source and is passionate about its potential. However, it is up to UK OSS companies to help support the government to help them realise its potential and make the transition as smoothly and effectively as possible.