Episode: 795
Title: HPR0795: John Uren on FLOSS in the UK Civil Service
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0795/hpr0795.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 02:39:24

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Hello ladies and gentlemen my name is Kanthalan and we're coming to you live to tape from
Ogkamp 11 and I'm here with John Euren and he's going to talk to us about the UK Civil
Service and open source software how it uses it and how it's hopefully going to do some
more contributing.
Okay, excellent.
We were talking last night and it seemed very interesting to me that the UK Civil Service
doesn't jump to mind as one of the top open source contributors can tell us a little
bit about that.
Well it's not one of the main open source contributors mainly because we have issues
around Crown Copyright so any work we do we really have Crown Copyright releasing issues
and in my particular organisation very simply the software isn't really used by the general
public.
Okay.
What sort of software do you use?
What sort of software do I use?
Well apart from the looks and windows at work a lot of homebrew, well a lot of
creative software that's created internally within the organisation.
Particularly in relation to open source do you mentioned Etherpad last night?
Yes.
I am minister of my works Etherpad server which has been an interesting project to get
around all the various hurdles and specifically the enormous bureaucracy which does exist.
It can be quite bureaucratic, even just getting a box to put it on, it's quite bureaucratic.
Okay, and what do you see as the main benefits for open source in the civil service?
One of them was cost because we don't have enormous amounts of money within the civil
service or UK government, we're going through spending reviews like right and centre.
Another one is the fact that you can just take it apart and hack it for your own needs
rather than taking something off the shelf which you then work out is not that good.
So I've done that with Etherpad in work, I've basically reconfigured it so it's better
for work and can be used by the people in work as a better tool for collaborating.
And Etherpad was one of the projects that Google purchased and then released back to the
community.
Yeah.
Do you find a lot of people are using that?
How are your changes accepted by the wider community?
My changes are sort of easily accepted, I've only sort of put one change back up stream
so far.
Mainly because we had issues releasing back stuff.
So I'm still having to work out more of a formal method of taking stuff that I do at work
and having them release back into the community.
That's one of the reasons I've actually had work out to work out the community's reaction
to the UK civil service, basically contributing stuff back.
Fantastic.
And is there a lot of people involved in open source in your organisation?
There are quite a few people.
They tend to do it in their not at work time but at home time.
So they'll do it as individuals at home.
So I know one guy is a Debian developer and there's quite a few sort of Linux sys admins
and general geeks, I work around a lot of mathematicians, there's a huge amount of geeks
there.
But they all do it as individuals at home rather than through work and we're at the point
where we're going, right, we need to do this as work rather than at home.
And did you know what have you done to encourage that?
We've created an open source software week to discuss the various issues around it to
get more open source adoption, basically top to bottom, to try and sort of calm down
fears from seniors that we can't get support for it or we can, or it'll contain holes.
The general fears are people have using open source.
And also to try and start discussing, at least within work, things like releasing stuff
back, which licenses to use because there's a multitude of licenses that we could use.
Sorting out, as I said before, the crown copyright issue and things like that.
Okay, fantastic.
Do you have anything else to add?
To be honest, thank you very much for coming and I hope you enjoyed the show.
All right, thank you.
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