Open Source in Goverment Organisations

According to Matt Asay in CNET, more and more government agencies are moving to open source software. We can see this trend already happening in Europe, perhaps even to a greater extent than in the US. Countries such as Germany and France have policies in place to make sure the government uses open source software. Not only, as the CNET article states, because of 'lower cost' or 'more flexibility', but for reasons of interoperability and freedom of information. This is of course in line with the classic definition of 'free software', where proponents say that it's all about 'free speech' and not 'free beer'.

And how does PHP fit in this trend? Judging from the increasing number of projects we are doing for central and local government agencies, the usage of PHP in the website and intranet infrastructures of these organisations is growing, too. Surely the fact that PHP is so open and makes applications so interoperable plays an important role there.

One of the interesting government projects we recently did was a security audit of a website of the Dutch central government, where all citizens are able to review the information that the government has stored about them. This openness is praiseworthy, and what's interesting is that they chose PHP to build this website. Obviously, the information that the government has is stored in several different IT systems built on many different technologies. PHP is a perfect choice to 'glue' all those government systems together into a single front-end, and the fact that it's open source is a perfect match to the whole trend of governments becoming more open on a more general level.