Creative Economy Blog

Open-source savings

Jon Kingsbury - 02.09.2010

The potential for open-source software to cut public sector costs is an exciting prospect and it's happening now

When delivered well and made universally accessible, the efficiencies and social benefits of technology are clear. Whether it’s helping people to renew their tax-disc online or keeping records on 60m people to provide a better health service, innovative technology can make a difference to the services we rely on.

And this means that the development of software as part of that technology by our public services is here to stay.

But developing new software is often expensive. The choices have traditionally been between employing in-house developers or buying-in software development from the market. Government policy is increasingly focused on the latter, arguing that clever procurement by the public sector can stimulate innovation as well as help support our creative economy.

But there is a problem - the way that the public sector goes about commissioning and developing software can often be expensive, lengthy and anything but fleet-of-foot.

Let’s take one example – that of procurement. Often, public sector organisations are required to go through a formalised EU buying exercise – designed to aid transparency and stimulate competition – but destined to be attractive not to small and innovative software businesses, but to large-scale suppliers who have the capacity to complete the hefty application forms. This is fair and open competition of course, but often competition that may be weighted against the little guy.

Even choosing several winning suppliers to compete can result in high costs if software development is done by traditional means. Cost of building the NHS records database using this technique has been estimated at £12bn.

It would be easy to turn this article into a black and white comparison about the evils of public sector procurement versus private sector efficiency.

Instead though, I want to highlight an area of growing interest to corporate organisations – ironically that of the public domain – as being increasingly used to develop innovative applications.

Want to know what Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and Google have in common?

The answer is that they all have a growing interest in driving software innovation by using open source software development. They are interested in using the public domain to help them keep ahead of the game.

Open source is as much of a philosophy as a practice. Instead of using developers to build proprietary software that remains closed off to others, open source development recruits a community of coders to help build new services which can then be used by anyone. The source code can be “forked” and used to build applications unrelated to the original software mission.

This method of open innovation by a community of programmers and developers is not new. “Free” software developed and improved by many people has been around for many years.

But in the last few years, high-growth commercial businesses have started to take this form of development seriously, with the result that a whole new raft of platforms and services like SourceForge, Launchpad and GitHub providing both space and version control systems to help optimise the process of open source development. There are currently thousands of open source projects on these sites, developing applications that range from new applications for Facebook through to new content management systems for local government authorities.

Even Google, one of the world’s largest employers of in-house, proprietary developers take an active part in the fostering of open source projects, running Summer of Code each year to encourage students and recent graduates to learn how to develop and manage open source development.

Why do they bother? Firstly, projects developed by people who care about them probably result in better code. Secondly, open source projects, because they are publicly available are subject to peer review in a way analogous to scientific innovation. Thirdly, open source development is a great way of showing off your talent by publishing “elegant” code. Finally, by recruiting a community of enthusiastic developers, open source software is often written at cost or even for free.

So, could open source software help our public services to deliver more for less? I personally think so. Taking the example of the £12bn NHS public records database, if you web search for “open source health records” you’ll find that there are tens of existing applications that might be deployed without licensing costs to the taxpayer. This demonstrates that some programmers care enough about public service delivery to write software to provide solutions.

Some caveats are needed. There will probably always be the need for in-house teams and proprietary software development. Security-checking of software is best done outside of the open-source domain for example. And we’re discovering too that managing open source software development requires real skill, effort and often diplomacy when engaging with a community of enthusiasts. But in these times of severe budget restraint, I think that innovation can be encouraged by the public sector making time and space for open source development as a viable option. It might just save us billions of pounds.


Jon Kingsbury is an Associate Director of NESTA and Head of External Supply for BBC Future Media & Technology. The views here are his own personal ones.