Open Source: Advantages for Government Entities

The promises about using open source software in government are those of higher quality, reliability, and flexibility as well as lower costs, and the end of dependence on predatory suppliers.

Open source software is software like any other. However, it is distinguished by its license or conditions of use, which guarantee certain freedoms, such as the right to access and modify the source code, and to use, reuse, and redistribute the software, all without royalties or other costs.

Governments worldwide have adopted it, thus becoming more innovative, agile, and profitable. The British government has a Government Action Plan for its use, as explained in Open Source, Open Standards, and Re-Use: Government Action Plan, which requires that open source be used when it offers the best value for money to the taxpayer in the provision of public services.

In addition, "to encourage innovation within the government, by encouraging open source thinking, and externally, to help develop a vibrant market. The IT industry and the wider economy benefit from the information we generate and the software we develop," the Plan specifies.

Since 2004, this government has increased the use of open source particularly in operating systems and middleware components of enterprise solutions. For example, more than 25% of secondary schools use the Linux operating system on at least one computer.

Software, and the IT market in general, developed from this initiative by making open source products more competitive and easier to include in enterprise solutions, and there were developments in the approach to government IT, such as the creation of the government IT profession and the recruitment of technology professionals in government, ​​that established skills and cultures with a broader outlook toward technology solution providers.

In 2011, the government published the UK Government ICT Strategy, which aimed to provide better public services at lower cost. The strategy-mandated action focused on ensuring that there was a level playing field for the evaluation of open source and proprietary software.

Open source was seen with a broader focus on reducing barriers to participation, including for SMEs, reducing vendor dependency, increasing the use of open standards, improving competitive tension, and reducing overall government IT costs.

Among the advantages the British government finds in open source are:

1. Contract acquisition, development, and implementation costs are likely to be lower than those of proprietary software.

2. Data transferability. With open source code and a move toward open data formats, there are greater opportunities to share data across interoperable platforms.

3. Greater opportunities for reuse. Because open source has no per-user or per-instance costs and there is guaranteed freedom of use in any form, reuse is enabled.

4. Pay once for development (if at all) and reuse across government where appropriate, thus offering cost-effectiveness.

5. By their collaborative design, many user-oriented open source products are intuitive.

6. Open source software can be operated and maintained by multiple vendors, fostering competition and allowing SMEs to compete in the government market.

The government was committed to implementing a clear reuse and interoperability agenda that included ensuring a level playing field for open source and proprietary software. Recognizing the advantages of OSS, the government considered that if there was no significant cost difference between open source and non-open source products, open source should be selected based on its additional inherent flexibility.

The study Open Standards and Open Source: Enabling Interoperability, published in the International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications, analyzes the role of open standards in interoperability, as well as some of the policies introduced in this regard by the European Union. It identifies open source as the best way to enable interoperability between different technologies and applications.

The analysis defines "interoperability as an important requirement for industries and governments in a society that is increasingly moving toward global collaboration and integration.

Interoperability is an enabler of the growth of the software (and hardware) industries. Any software company can produce large and small applications and utilities, competing in the open market if it knows that its products coexist and connect with other applications or pieces of software already developed and available, or even with similar future products."

Open source development makes special sense in the field of interoperability, according to this study, because the best way to build things that work together is when a group of people or companies also work collectively, at the code level, creating something that everyone can use.

In other countries, such as the United States, the advantages of open source have also been evident for years to governments, both local and federal, so they have issued policies to support its development.

The Federal Source Code Policy (FSCP) was designed to support reuse and public access to custom-developed federal source code. It requires that new source code, developed specifically by or for the federal government, be available for sharing and reuse across all federal agencies. In addition, the policy supports the publication of this software.

Code.gov is the platform created to share open source software across US government agencies. This is to "unlock the tremendous potential of Federal Government software," helping agency partners and developers save money and increase quality by promoting code reuse and educating and connecting their community.

As an open source monitoring tool, Zabbix has extensive global experience with the successful use of its software in a wide variety of government instances. The effective use of data monitoring through open source tools, such as Zabbix, is essential for public administrations to face current challenges and prepare for a smarter and more responsive future. There are two important approaches when we talk about the challenge of providing greater efficiency in IT monitoring management in the government sector. One is to look at the process, resources, and tools.

When we look at the process, we understand that a need, especially in government, is to map and plan appropriate strategies and resources for the qualification of the services provided to citizens or that, in some way, impact these people. IT monitoring, in this case, enables the availability and quality of the services that benefit the population.

The other perspective is to analyze the resources that we will use to comply with this process. This is where open source tools become a fundamental asset for public organizations, precisely because of the cost of acquiring the tool with everything it allows to deliver. In this context, it is crucial to consider the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of open source solutions, which is often significantly lower than that of proprietary platforms, especially when taking into account the absence of expensive licenses and the flexibility in customization and maintenance. In addition, the return on investment of these tools is often high, since they allow for rapid adaptation to specific needs and a considerable reduction in long-term operating costs.

In Mexico, CENACE, the agency in charge of the operational control of the National Electric System, uses the Zabbix monitoring system in 12 facilities distributed throughout the country, from where more than 10,000 devices are monitored, as explained in detail at Zabbix Forum LATAM 2023, Luis Carlos Molina Félix, CENACE ICT director, in his presentation National Monitoring Trajectory, Zabbix Implementation.

In Brazil, Zabbix is ​​the main infrastructure monitoring tool at Petrobras, and is responsible for generating 98% of the alarms related to infrastructure events. In the Zabbix Tool Use Case at Petrobras, presented at Zabbix Forum LATAM 2024, this huge Brazilian state-owned company explains the benefits observed, such as the significant gain related to monitoring quality, simplicity, flexibility, visibility, and scalability of the system.

The greater maturity of open source products and services has facilitated their use by governments. However, open source software is gaining ground slowly, particularly compared to the private sector, due to a lack of understanding of its potential benefits and a risk-averse technical and procurement culture, compounded by significant levels of misconceptions about the security of open source and its ecosystem of services.

A change in mindset is required for those involved in writing requirements or conducting procurement or projects to take advantage of the promise of open source software. The challenge is to enable both proprietary and open source solutions to be proposed, compared, and fairly evaluated on their own merits.