UK Government boost for open source (hopefully)

The UK Government yesterday announced it wants to promote the use of open source software in the public sector. There’s a good discussion of this on the Guardian’s technology blog:  UK government puts open source software on equal footing for procurement.

From the point of view of improving value for money in public sector website development,  I think this is definitely good news -  particularly if it boosts the use of open source content management systems over their proprietary cousins. The policy also contains a welcome commitment to open formats for information published on government websites.

Andrew Donoghue has a funny take on the story at ZDNet: UK Government reckons this open source thingy could catch on maybe.