The Dutch Government is not doing enough for open source

Oct 17, 2014 14:59 GMT  ·  By

The Dutch parliament is pushing for the use of more open source software in the country and is holding the government responsible for the failure to better implement the already existing policies.

The Dutch government (Holland) has already agreed that it must adopt open source and open standards in all the areas where this is possible. On the other hand, the parliament feels that the executive branch has done too little in this regard and they are urging them to expedite the issues.

In Holland, the use of open source and proprietary systems needs to be on equal footing, for IT projects that cost more than €5 million ($6.4 million). That means that when the government implements something that has an IT infrastructure, it must weigh the costs for both the open source and proprietary solutions. It looks like they haven't been doing a good job.

The parliament pushes for more action, less talk

The problem is that despite the fact that Dutch government has made a commitment to open source for more than a decade, things have not been moving in the right direction. In fact, very few actions have been undertaken. This is an important source of funds and getting open source projects off the ground and in the same ball park with the proprietary ones will help save a lot of money.

Now, a new report has been put forward by the Dutch parliament and it details what has been done until now and what has to be done from now on.

"The government has already agreed to opt for open source and open standards, wherever possible. Only, in practice this happens too little. This has to change - open source and open standards can result in major cost savings, but they also open the door to dissenting voices. Such criticism is to be encouraged, and one of the ways to achieve this is to use open source, enabling outsiders to think along."

"The parliament wants the government to report the savings it realises by using open source. This is to become part of the annual business reports of the government. The text was compiled by a temporary committee on government ICT projects. This committee concludes that failures of government ICT projects have led to an unnecessary waste of taxpayers' money," reads the report made on the official website of the European Union.

Holland is one of the most advanced countries in Europe, in this regard, and it's one of the few that aggressively pushes for the use of open software. A lot of other countries will be watching to see just how much success it will have and it's possible to see other governments doing the same things.