A free and open source Scotland

When Scotland becomes an independent country in March 2016, as per the vision of the Scottish Government, a great number of new public bodies will come into being. In large part, these will probably deal with public administration; Scotland will have, for instance, its own body for the administration of welfare and pensions for the first time ever. The establishment of new bodies like this has already been subject to some discussion by anxious Unionists, but the opportunities it provides have not been as eagerly addressed by pro-independence politicians.

One of my favourite items on the Scottish Socialist Party’s list of policies declares “support for the open source software movement”. It goes on to say that free and open source software should be used by public bodies “where available and appropriate”. I wholeheartedly agree. I shudder to imagine the thousands of pounds that public bodies in Scotland pay to companies like Microsoft for software licenses when viable free software alternatives exist. Scotland should take a cue from the city council of Munich, Germany (a city twice the size of Glasgow), which decided in 2003 to migrate from Windows to a variant of the free and open source operating system Linux – and saved €11 million EUR in the process.

I suspect that the establishment of new public bodies in Scotland will involve the implementation of new practices and policies, regardless of how much of the workforce and infrastructure is inherited from the UK Government. The Scottish Government has already observed that independence is a natural point at which to review the ways in which public bodies in Scotland and the UK operate; as a result, there’s really no better time to observe the value of switching to free and open source software. Not only is such a switch likely to save money – in the long-term if not the short-term – but open source software is consistently shown to be faster, more reliable, and more secure than its proprietary competitors.

There are few substantive reasons why Microsoft Office should be chosen over LibreOffice, or Photoshop over The GIMP. Free software provides the same functionality, but their use doesn’t support software monopolies which lock businesses and individuals into staying with expensive software packages (which is the intended effect of Microsoft developing document formats that only their software is designed to read). Delightfully, whatever the Scottish Government and its bodies put into the development of free and open source software – like the resources Munich has invested – will be returned to the people; the same is not true of funding proprietary software development.

To some people, the battle between proprietary software and free software is an ideological one. The former is developed by privately-owned, profit-oriented businesses, while the latter is produced through voluntary co-operation and mutual interest. Free software licenses are designed to enable redistribution and derivation – this opens quality software to all, regardless of their ability to pay, and also fosters innovation by giving all programmers, hobbyist and professional, the opportunity to contribute and experiment. It’s unsurprising that it’s our socialist party that supports free software so explicitly, given that free software’s success stands in contradiction of beliefs that corporate money and hierarchy always produce the best results.

There were three years between Munich’s agreement to migrate to Linux (a distribution of their own development, called LiMux) and the actual start of the migration process. Their time-scale is widely regarded as having been somewhat unambitious. A distribution tailored for the needs of the Scottish Government could probably be developed and rolled out within a parliamentary term, if only there exists the will to make it happen.