I may be speaking on a panel about Open Source in Government next month, and it got me thinking about the issue again. I realized that the interesting question for government is not really about open source vs commercial software, but about open data and open apis.
Open source has two elements to it - consumption and production. The decision to consume open source is really just a vendor selection issue. Companies and governments should choose to consume open source software on a case by case basis, using it when it makes more sense than competing commercial products (more sense usually meaning cheaper). Production is a more interesting question - i.e. whether government should be releasing any custom code they write, be that improvements to open source projects or integration code for commercial software, as open source for public consumption.
My suspicion is that while it is certainly nice to have the government releasing such code, it is unlikely to be very important. What seems far more interesting is the data that the government has, which would be both unique and powerful. My thought is that if government agencies were to open their data and apis to their systems (obviously within the boundaries of privacy and security needs), the wider community could do amazing work with mashups, portals and other apps building on those open resources.
Here are some examples:
- A Google Maps add-on using DOT data to show traffic accident density, and thus show the public what roads are most dangerous.
- A politics portal letting users search for bills on a particular issue and see which members of congress voted for and against a bill
- Ad Analytics packages consuming census data and geolocation data to make better guesses about the demographics of a given user
The community would build these and thousands of other valuable apps enabled by such openness. To me, this seems far more interesting than government contributing a few more AJAX libraries.