Sep 05, 2024 09:09 PM IST
The open-source philosophy is a great way to reimagine technology use to unlock public value, but this requires the public sector to build trust first.
This May, Switzerland enacted the Federal Law on the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfilment of Governmental Tasks (EMBAG) to ensure greater transparency, security, and efficiency in government operations by promoting the use of open-source software (OSS). The dominant alternative to OSS (which is released with variations of licences that may grant that grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose) is proprietary software. The latter’s licence may limit users’ ability to modify, redistribute or even examine the source code.
The Swiss law stipulates that all public bodies must disclose the source code of software developed by or for them unless precluded by third-party rights or security concerns. The Indian government had started down this path years ago. In 2015, it announced two policies — one for the adoption of OSS in government and another for collaborative software development by opening up government source code. However, the mere use of OSS to create derivatives — which the Indian government has been prolific at — limits the potential of open source. Sharing back to the open-source ecosystem and building engagement with the technology community are key to realising the main benefits of OSS usage. Ten years ago, the Swiss Federal Information Technology Regulatory Body prevented the Swiss Federal Supreme Court from making prize-winning free software OpenJustitia “publicly accessible” to local courts and the public, citing possible market distortion and absence of a legal foundation for sharing of State software. As the software had been developed because no existing solution fit their needs, governmental support for OSS would facilitate the creation of a new, competing market. The recent law reverses this stance.
OSS’s main benefits are the ability to avoid vendor lock-in and maintain strategic control of digital assets, lowering the total cost of ownership of projects and improved quality of software. Open source is a two-way street, starting with transparent engagement by project owners/custodians to kickstart discussions around a project and nurture a community, as well as the subsequent feedback and contributions from users to keep these projects thriving. National governments such as that of Estonia, the UK and South Korea have made efforts to use and contribute to OSS in their data exchange platforms, voter registration, and government-wide standards for IT adoption.
The Centre’s attempts to create and share OSS date back to 2008, with the Bharat Operating Systems Solution project, for a localised and practical alternative to Microsoft Windows for e-governance requirements. With the policy interventions in 2015, India gradually increased the use of OSS in government projects, established OpenForge, a platform for sharing reusable software, and committed to making key solutions such as CoWIN open and available to other countries.
OpenForge has had little community engagement for the last five years, and the extent of adoption of the platform within the government is unknown. When the use of Aarogya Setu for Covid-19 contact tracing raised privacy concerns in 2020, a brief flurry of activity saw a one-time, perfunctory release of code on Github and then no updates or engagement with the over 400 issues and discussions initiated by the community since, although the application continued to be updated and evolved over the next two years.
Existing public sector processes are ill-suited to making software open and collaborating with the community. Institutions require dedicated capacity, resources and a mindset shift to meaningfully engage in open source. First, software procurement and development processes need an open-by-default approach. The experience of commercial business models built around OSS provides many relevant lessons for the public sector, and the concept of Open Source Program Offices to build such capacity is slowly catching up in government. Second, interest from the community will be highest in “high value” projects — those with a wide scope of reusability or high stakes for transparency and accountability. Third, building a community around OSS requires long-term collaboration and being open to feedback.
The public sector globally is gearing up to play a bigger role in the open-source ecosystem. Switzerland’s ten-year journey is emblematic of this. The open-source philosophy is a great way to reimagine technology use and governance to unlock public value, but this requires the public sector to build trust first.
Sridhar Ganapathy is principal and Hemant Adarkar is technology advisor and senior fellow, Artha Global.The views expressed are personal
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