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Loading ...Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) received a boost last week, with the UK Government posting a Government Action Plan on Open Source, Open Standards and Re-Use. Quoting from the forward:
“Open Source has been one of the most significant cultural developments in IT and beyond over the last two decades: it has shown that individuals, working together over the Internet, can create products that rival and sometimes beat those of giant corporations; it has shown how giant corporations themselves, and Governments, can become more innovative, more agile and more cost-effective by building on the fruits of community work; and from its IT base the Open Source movement has given leadership to new thinking about intellectual property rights and the availability of information for re–use by others.”
As well as software, this also applies to government interface standards.  ”ConsultationXML is now Open Source, as announced in this post on theDExtrousweb:
We’re terribly, fantastically pleased to announce that after a bit of wrangling, Steph Gray and I are able to release ConsultationXML as open source software under the GNU Affero license. The recent report on open source software in Government hinted that departments ought to try to release source code for the software they commission, and we’re delighted to be (we think!) the first to do so. [more...]
The thread is picked up in a post on helpful technology, which also provides links to the specifications. I’ve mentioned in a post on the Digital Britain report that this is a great way to stimulate the development of new applications - setting the open source development community loose on (non-sensitive!) UK government data.
Expect to see more open source and open standards on a network near you soon.
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