Submission + - UK Government Removing Barriers to Open Source (cio.gov.uk)
christian.einfeldt writes: "On February 24, the Chief Information Officer Council of the UK issued new guidelines which changes the way that the government of the United Kingdom will acquire software. The new guidelines will require that all UK agencies 'consider open source solutions on their merits according to total lifetime cost of ownership' and seek to quantify proprietary exit costs and proprietary lock-in as factors affecting the overall costs of software. The rules also direct agencies to share their evaluations of software, so that where open source solutions are evaluated and approved by one part of the UK government, that evaluation should not be repeated, but instead shared. The new policies also show a UK preference for the Open Document Format over the 'emerging' Office Open XML format. Sun Microsystems Open Source Officer Simon Phipps thinks that the new guidelines will go a long way toward shifting the UK's software acquisition policy from a procurement-driven market model, which favors proprietary software, to an adoption-led market model, which places open source software on a more equal footing with proprietary software."
