THE UK Conservative Party has given the thumbs up to open source software.

Apparently, if the party takes power, it will end the cosy relationship between proprietary software outfits and the UK civil service which has been going on since the Thatcher years.

Shadow chancellor George Osborne said that while IT should be at the heart of any government's agenda, the way that the UK has set about such projects has been expensive and largely useless.

Projects like the NHS supercomputer shambles, the SATs marking disaster, the catastrophe of the rural payments agency and the fact that the government spends £100 billion on IT and that figure is £19 billion over budget, would all be solved by going to open source technology, he claimed.

Osborne said that the government needs to stop thinking that when it comes to procuring IT systems big is always beautiful. Designing big projects means only a few companies can deliver them, and this means higher costs when suppliers let the public sector down.

Osborne, who has obviously been reading Linux Today over some bloke on the train's shoulder, said that moving to "open standards" would create a common language for government IT.

Bigger projects can be split into smaller elements, which can be delivered by different suppliers and then bolted together. Since smaller projects are inherently less risky, this approach reduces the chance of cost overruns and opens up the procurement process to innovative start-ups, Osborne said.

The government is lagging far behind with open-source suppliers all too often locked out of its contracts. Conservative Party research believes that the government could save more than £600 million a year if it made more use of open source as part of a competitive procurement system, he said.

Critics say that this figure is a tiny drop in the ocean in terms of IT spend, and that it is not clear exactly how open source projects will be any more successful than proprietary ones, given that they will still be designed, managed and implemented by the same incompetent buffoons. X