New Zealand Government Department Embraces Open Source

By Greg McNevin

December 14, 2007: A new report from New Zealand’s Ministry of Justice has put open source solutions ahead of their proprietary peers, claiming that they are more cost-effective, supportable and stable.

Compiled by Barry Polley, MoJ A&S, the Ministry of Justice Open Source Discussion Paper kicks off its analysis by proclaiming that “Software development has changed” and that “The old model of a software development firm's success … is being turned on its head by Open Source Software.”

While the report does recognise open source software is not without some shortcomings, it overwhelmingly dismisses many traditional arguments against it, such as lack of commercial support, unreliability, poor user interfaces and legal risks.

It claims reliability is superior due to the source code being available for anyone to examine and improve, and that security is by the same means improved as the code, possible warts and all, is open for all to examine.

When it comes to support, the report also comes down in favour of open source solutions stating that they pose less risk as many companies whose entire business is support can exists for any given piece of software, and next to this open source software solutions will not lose support or disappear entirely as proprietary software could if its developer went bust.

Polley claims that Government adoption of OSS is now extensive around the world. “As proprietary and bespoke systems reach the ends of their useful lives, the opportunity now exists to replace them with OSS assemblies rather than launch new RFP processes for monolithic, closed solutions,” he writes in the report.

Based on his findings, Polley says that the Ministry needs an explicit strategy to embrace the adoption and use of OSS, and that “Given two equivalent packages, one open and one proprietary, the OSS one would be the preferable choice for reasons of better supportability and lower life cycle cost.”

“Our vendors are moving to OSS without our encouragement or consent; Java is the primary development language and also OSS, Weblogic is a major IT supplier currently merging OSS into their products, and the perimeter Check Point firewall runs an OSS operating system,” writes Polley.

“We cannot choose to keep OSS out of the Ministry; our choices are to accept our vendors' decisions as they occur, or to adopt OSS for strategic benefit on terms of our choosing.”

The full text of the report can be found on the New Zealand Open Source Society’s website.

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