E-GOVERNMENT
Governments to fuel open source growth
18-07-2006
by Maxim Kelly
A new report claims open source software will thrive in the governmental sector based on its inherent adaptability.
IDC researchers at Government Insights (GI) suggest that open source products -- software solutions distributed under a public licence allowing any programmer to tinker with the underlying code -- are poised for significant growth, fuelled in particular by the public sector. Overall the report predicts a 30 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) as part of total global IT spending over the next five years.
"Government software needs are unique because governments perform a unique function -- service to the citizen," said GI researcher Shawn P. McCarthy. "Unlike the private sector, when governments help co-ordinate the open source development process, they greatly benefit from the code that is created, even if the code is freely available to others."
McCarthy believes an open source application customised for one state or local government body will likely be easily transferred to other bodies' needs.
GI predicts government IT departments will most likely drive substantial growth in the use of open source software over the next five years, with rapid growth in the five to ten-year time frame. This study also predicts a "value shift" for software within the government community, citing the initial shift driven by state and local governments sharing their custom-developed solutions.
These forecasts are divided into three categories: Application Development and Deployment; Applications; and System Infrastructure Software.
"This is the same kind of aggressive growth that we saw in the early days of Linux," said McCarthy. "There is reason to believe that this growth will continue past 2010, making both traditional and government co-ordinated open source projects a force to be reckoned with in the next decade. Government agencies are now developing their own open code repositories, and also working with system integrators to develop new government-specific open source solutions."
Meanwhile, moves by Microsoft are signaling a slowly increasing tolerance for the open source approach by some of the big proprietary software houses.
On Tuesday Microsoft expanded its alliance with open source server virtualiser Xensource. The agreement means "Xen-enabled" Linux operating systems can run on top of the virtualiszation software bundled with Longhorn, the next version of Windows Server.
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