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Thursday, 3rd January 2008, No Comments »

Open Source in Government

Just before Christmas the Ministry of Justice released their Open Source Strategy, which is actually a pretty interesting document, especially in the context of what’s been going on with OOXML. I would also love to see/hear Microsoft New Zealand’s rebuttal to this. However, what really caught my eye was this statement;

Many technical companies have followed Google’s lead in allowing staff to contribute to OSS projects as part of their job responsibilities. It’s unclear whether the taxpayer would approve of such policies here, and in any event the desire to give back to a code community can conflict with job performance expectations.

As (currently) a former public servant and taxpayer, I would not only encourage public servants to contribute to OSS projects, I would expect that it be considered as part of their job performance (that ‘keep abreast with current and up coming technologies’ suddenly has something measurably around it, crazy!). A staff member who was actively part of an OSS project/community that the agency had implemented would be worth their weight in gold as far as I’m concerned.

Only in a few instances could I really imagine a conflict between code releases back into the community and job performance, but even then it can be minimised to reduce the risk by a smart developer/manager and some clear guidelines.

However the reality is that the majority of agencies engage vendors to actually do the majority of the work, so as far as I can see the real question is, why aren’t agencies making the vendors release code back into the community or doing it themselves once the project is completed?

Customisations, optimisations, tweaks and modules that agencies have ‘commissioned’ would/could easily be of benefit of the wider community, not just another agencies. It’d also give them that indie-cred to be an ‘employer of choice’ for skilled technical professionals.