2002–2014 · Open source

Why UK government was slow to adopt open source, and what changed

Last reviewed 6 October 2026

UK policy said open source should compete fairly from 2002, but procurement culture held adoption back for years. Open standards rules in the 2010s finally shifted it.

The policy on paper

The UK government published an open source policy in 2002. It said open source software should be considered alongside proprietary products, with decisions based on value for money, and that government would avoid lock-in to single suppliers. The policy was updated in 2004.

In practice, most departments kept buying large proprietary systems through long outsourcing contracts.

Culture, not code

Studies and commentators in the mid-2000s, including the European Commission’s open source observatory, pointed out that the main barrier in Britain was cultural rather than technical. Procurement favoured big suppliers who could carry contract risk. Officials worried about support and accountability, and few departments had in-house skills to run open source systems.

Countries such as France, Germany and Spain were seen as further ahead, with ministries and city governments running large open source desktop and server projects.

Pushes for change

In 2009 the government published an action plan on open source, open standards and re-use, telling departments to give open source a fair chance in procurement.

After 2010 the coalition government made cost-cutting and smaller contracts a priority. The Government Digital Service, set up in 2011, built services in-house, published much of its code openly and wrote coding in the open into its service standards.

In 2014 the government adopted open standards for its documents, choosing the Open Document Format for editable documents alongside PDF/A and HTML, a decision aimed at reducing dependence on any single office suite.

The legacy

Today open source is normal in UK public-sector technology, from websites to cloud infrastructure, and publishing code is expected for new services. The long gap between the 2002 policy and real change is a common example of how procurement habits shape technology more than policy statements do.