There have been some very encouraging noises recently about increased use of open source software by the UK Government: for example we’ve seen the creation of an Open Source Procurement Toolkit by the Cabinet Office, which lists Xapian and Apache Lucene/Solr as alternatives to the usual closed source options. The CESG, the “UK Government’s National Technical Authority for Information Assurance”, has clarified its position on open source software, which has led to the Cabinet Office dispelling some of the old myths about security and open source. We know that the Cabinet Office’s ‘skunkworks’, the Government Digital Service, are using Solr for several of their projects. Francis Maude MP was recently in the USA with some of the GDS team and visited amongst others our US partners Lucid Imagination.
The British Computer Society have helped organise a series of Awareness Events for civil servants and I’m glad to be speaking at the first of these next Tuesday 21st February on open source search – hopefully this will further increase the momentum and make it even more clear that a modern Government needs to consider this modern, flexible and economically scalable approach to software.
