The United Kingdom's government unveiled its new central services and information website, GOV.UK, this week Tuesday. The site is completely built on open source, saving the government some 70 million GBP (about 86 million euro) compared to the previous site, according to Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office. He expects the site to achieve further savings "as more departments and agencies move to on the platform".
Commenting on the new site, the minister writes: "GOV.UK has been built using open source technology, which means we don’t have to pay expensive software licensing costs."
Minister Maude says the release of GOV.UK "is a key element in the Digital by Default agenda. Digital by Default aims to transform public services online – making them better and cheaper for taxpayers and more effective and efficient for government."
"Today marks the start of a new way of delivering public services digitally. GOV.UK is a platform for future digital innovation. In stark contrast to the way IT has been delivered in government in the past, GOV.UK can rapidly accommodate new standards for development and security, catering to emerging technologies and user requirements quickly and effectively."
Reporting on the new GOV.UK, IT news site Computerworld points to blogs written by the developers of the web site, working for the Government Digital Service, who reflect on the key advantages of open source for this kind of project. "By choosing open source we can quickly try the tools that seem right, test them out, and make a decision about whether this is the right solution and start using the software straight away."
Developer James Stewart: "We're making our code available for others to use. We tend to talk about that as Coding In The Open rather than Open Source. Partly because we're not currently in a position to build and support a community around that code, and partly because most of it's so tailored to our system that we're not sure how useful it will be to others right now. But rest assured, if you see something useful you can use it – it's published under an MIT licence."
More information:
GOV UK
Statement on GOV UK by the Minister for the Cabinet Office
Statement on GOV OK by the Government Digital Service
Computerworld UK news item
Guardian news item