Open codes for an open society – German Foreign Office saves money by using open source software
For the first time, software developed especially for the German foreign office has been placed on line for others to download and use. VerA.web is event planning software that the Foreign Office had custom-developed to save contact information in various languages and alphabets.
By placing VerA.web online, the Foreign Office has become the first German Ministry to join the "open source" movement. While traditional software developers closely guard the inner workings of their products as valuable intellectual property, open source developers subscribe to the philosophy that software can be made better and for less money if anyone can view the underlying code, test it, and make changes. The more people looking under the hood, the theory goes, the better the engine can be tuned.
VerA.web is just a small part of a project that has been years in the making. In 2001, the Foreign Office began the task of networking over 220 missions abroad with the headquarters in Berlin. If traditional software had been used, the price tag for the project would have been about 50 million euro (70 million dollars). By using products based on the open source Linux operating system, the Foreign Office reduced the cost to 17 million euro.
In addition to Linux, the Foreign Office uses open source products like the Internet browser Firefox, the email program Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, a free suite of core office programs.
Cost-effective and secure
The results of working with open office products have been impressive. Today, the Foreign Office spends less than one third of the average amount spent per employee on IT in all other German government ministries. What's more, the Office achieved these dramatic savings despite the fact that 80 percent of its computers are located abroad, often in unfavorable climates that cause them to wear out more quickly than in central Europe.
Another advantage of open source software is that it better meets the Foreign Office's strict security requirements. It is more difficult for hackers to infiltrate open source software, because users are constantly testing the software and can quickly eliminate security gaps.
Standard applications to be replaced by new programs
In the Foreign Office today, Firefox is the standard web browser, official emails are written using Thunderbird and official notebooks are exclusively furnished with Linux and OpenOffice. Because these free programs cannot perform every task, additional open-source software is often custom-designed for the Foreign Office.
Programs like “Fitz” (Finances Network), “RK-Pass” and “RK-Lissy” (a passport application with biometric capability and a database for tracing persons) were all developed by small to mid-sized German companies especially for the needs of the Foreign Office. Thus, the German economy also profits from the strategy of using open source products whenever possible.
By publishing the VerA.web software, the Foreign Office is staying true to the open source philosophy of making all developments public. The Foreign Office's IT-Director, Dr. Rolf Schuster, hopes that other German ministries and agencies will soon follow this example.
Last updated 24.09.2007