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Glyn Moody's look at all levels of the enterprise open source stack. The blog will look at the organisations that are embracing open source, old and new alike (start-ups welcome), and the communities of users and developers that have formed around them (or not, as the case may be).

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UK Government Opens Up a Little More...Or Not

Published 09:47, 03 March 09

Note: On re-reading the site, I don't think this an official wiki, just a sensible attempt to support the UK government strategy. So maybe my headline and kudos were sadly premature....

Note 2: Now confirmed: the site has added: "note that OpenSourceGov is not funded or officially supported by the UK government." So the kudos for creating the site goes elsewhere, and the UK government is back where it was. Ignore what I said below. Sigh.

One of the central questions arising out of last week's big announcement of the UK government's open source strategy and action plan is how seriously this is going to be taken, or whether it's purely window-dressing for the next election. Here's a hopeful sign that maybe something will happen after all: the creation of a new site called OpenSourceGov:

This site has been created to support the UK government's open source strategy and action plan. Hopefully soon, anyone who wants to know a bit about what open source is, and what it can do, will be able to find plenty to read here.

There are various sections about open source and the use of open source in UK government. It has to be said that they're all pretty thin, but the other interesting aspect of this site (aside from its existence) is the following:

This site is a wiki, which means that anyone can add to or edit it. You do need to create an account, and login first though, just to make sure you're nice. Use the links below to start navigating around.

That, too, is a pretty hopeful sign that someone, somewhere, is beginning to get this openness lark. In addition, these pages could become an important resource about the governmental use of open source in the UK. Interesting times.

Tags: open source