It's probably worth taking a read through the comments this morning from shadow chancellor George Osborne - which I suppose makes him Gordon Brown to Cameron's Blair - who suggests that open source software is worth investigating at a governmental level because the cost savings can produce great secondary benefits.
From the speech, which is on our Comment is Free pages:
Governments are also getting in on the act by using open source software. This is software that's typically developed by a community of developers, and whose source code is made openly available to licensed users, making it possible for them to tailor the software to their needs and make continuous iterative improvements.
Not only is this a really cheap way of designing software, but it's often faster and more effective too.
Looking at cost savings that have been achieved by companies and governments all over the world, it's estimated that the UK government could reduce its annual IT bill by over £600m a year if more open source software was used as part of an effective procurement strategy. That's enough to pay for 20,000 extra teachers or 100,000 hip operations.
He also suggests that "open source politics" can help generate momentum for the Conservative movement in the UK, pointing to high-level wonk Iain Dale's much publicised efforts in blogging and internet telly. But that gets up the nose of our very own Andrew Brown, who takes a moment out of discussing hacking your car engine to take Osborne to task:
Even when it is possible for the government to discuss completely openly and in good faith difficult decisions, "information" on its own doesn't make for an equality of power. For that you need judgment, which is rather harder to distribute.
A further response just dropped into my inbox from OpenForum Europe - whose director Graham Taylor says that "To see top-level politicians genuinely examining the cost and other benefits of open source in the UK, as we have seen in Europe for some time, is very welcome".
