The government supports open source software in theory – but it isn’t backing up this up in its IT spending decisions

When Gordon Brown has more free time in the near future to wonder how Labour could have done more to enrich society then the words "open source" ought to figure prominently. Open source – the movement in which people all over the world collaborate to create software to run on computers, mobile phones and other devices – offers hope for the future of the world. Call it what you like: whether it's globalisation with a human face, socialism without the state or capitalism making peace with primeval communism, it doesn't matter. At the level of the nation state there may be powerful centrifugal forces breaking countries up into smaller, more nationalistic, units. But this is coinciding with even more powerful social forces, enabled by new technology, that are creating global networks such as Facebook, Twitter and the open source software (OSS) movement. Iran may be at odds with the rest of the world but lots of its programmers will be involved in OSS and networks because that is the way the world is going. Except in the UK, that is. A Labour government looking for "modern" ways of achieving its historical mission should be in the vanguard of open source, especially now it is expanding to produce hardware such as cars, mobile phones and water pumps collaboratively . At its highest level people give their services free for mutual benefit (see Wikipedia), but OSS also embraces paid employees in corporations such as IBM – as long as they make results available to others.

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The government supports open source software in theory – but it isn't backing up this up in its IT spending decisions