Socitm president Richard Steel believes open source
still lags behind commercial products.
Speaking after publication of the
government's policy on open source software, Steel, who also
heads up IT at Newham Borough Council, wrote on his
blog, "I don't
like the term 'open source'. It's misleading what many people mean
is 'anything but Microsoft' few businesses actually use open source
directly - they buy software derived from open source that has been
commercially packaged and sold with support, which, in practice, is
little different to licensed software."
In Steel's experience, open source software development lags
proprietary development by several years. "I don't think we could
achieve the anytime, anywhere fixed and mobile infrastructure with
telepresence we require for flexible and new ways of working using
only open source," he said.
However Steel added that he would not rule out using open source
at Newham. The council signed a ground-breaking 10-year contract
with Microsoft and HP in 2003, where Steel ran a
competitive tender with Windows against Linux. He said, "Newham
has used open source for some applications since the time it did
its deal with Microsoft and continues to do so."
