Garner Technology

I have been a big fan of open source software over the years and noticed the quality of these solutions to have improved greatly.  Despite the quality of many of these solutions, very little is prevalent in local government.  A recent initiative by the City of Vancouver aims to change this by putting open source software on an equal footing with commercial offerings.

A quick Google search shows that most of the activity on the open source front has been in Europe.  These two sites the Open Source Academy and the Open Forum Europe both provide a rich set of resources and references for open source deployments in local government.  Sun Microsystems (the original developers of Open Office) has also been a big supporter of open source and recently posted an article about the benefits of open source in government.

There has been some experimentation with open source in BC but little in the way of using these applications in any significant role in local government operations beyond web servers (please feel free to share your examples of open source success or failure!).  This is not the case for BC’s school districts and libraries where open source has been embraced as a way to provide IT solutions in a climate of ever decreasing budgets.

So why are BC municipalities (or most North American municipalities for that matter) not adopting open source more readily even in the face of an apparent proven track record?  The most often used reason that I hear is the risk associated with open source support that, it is believed, does not exist with commercial software.  Certainly, this may be the case for lesser known applications however the open source community has developed some star applications that are well supported (arguably better than many commercial versions!).  Consider Firefox (browser), OpenOffice (office suite), Ubuntu (and other variations of Linux operating system), GIMP (photo editing), Nvu (web authoring), WordPress (content management), MySQL (database), MapServer (GIS web-mapping) and a host of others all of which have demonstrated a solid developer base and even large companies that support these initiatives.

Municipalities owe it to their tax payers to consider open source as an alternative to commercial software.  To that end, Vancouver has taken a bold, if not late, step toward giving open source its chance in local government.