Open source works in a down economy, observers say. Businesses are looking to it to save money on licensing and development costs, among other things. But does open source work in a government IT environment? State agencies and local governments are finding that it does, especially when the collaborative aspect is considered.

Deborah Bryant, who directs the annual Government Open Source Conference, says that people are looking to save money, and though not many states will adopt formalized policies in favor of open source, "there may be people who are going to need to take a second look at what open source can do."

For instance, the Massachusetts Geographic Information Service (MassGIS) makes use of servers and software from OpenGeo (a division of the Open Planning Project, based in New York City) to make all of the geospatial information for the state available for other state agencies, and to a certain extent, for the public. OpenGeo CEO Chris Holmes says the agency serves up all of the state's aerial photography and maps — 600 or more layers of map information, he said — using open source technology.

It's the extra capacity provided by open source that allowed the agency to open the information to the public. And it's information that's used in a variety of ways — from property valuation and taxation, to transit system mapping and routing to zoning and planning. Though he says MassGIS made the decision to go with OpenGeo before the economy began to show signs of trouble, Holmes indicated that the organization has seen an increase in interest of late. "It's hard to say what it's due to, but we have had about a 20 percent increase in downloads in the last two months," Holmes says. "I don't know if it's the financial crisis or if it's just that more people are hearing about us, but more people are considering us."

Added capacity is also a driver for Michael Tutty, an enterprise architect for the Iowa Department of Administrative Services (DAS), who says his organization is consistently pointing its state agency clients toward open source, especially when it comes to Web hosting and application integration. "We can take a server, and under Linux, we can get 200 applications on that one server. Under Windows, however, we can only get 25 or 30 applications on a similarly sized server. So it's a big driver for us to move everything over to Linux-based hosting," he says.

As for application integration, Tutty says Iowa DAS "stumbled across" Jitterbit tools when the organization was having problems integrating an ERP system. "It was open source and you could just download it," he says. The community forums were robust, and he noticed several responses from important people in the company. Upon deciding it was worth checking out, Tutty says, "I downloaded it, and an hour later I was doing something productive with it. Since then it has just snowballed." He estimates at least 15 other people within Iowa DAS make use of Jitterbit tools on a daily basis — and that doesn't count those in other agencies that decided to check it out on their own after hearing about it at one of the organization's Lunch and Learn seminars.

Bryant agrees that open source integration tools are popular among government agencies, as are network monitoring and management tools. Three things are driving continued government interest in open source, she says. The first is that several open source applications have matured to an "enterprise-class" level. Second, there are many more system integrators and software vendors around now that are "open source savvy" as Bryant puts it. After all, government agencies won't go it alone when it comes to implementing open source. Thirdly, agencies and governments at all levels are networking to learn from each other and find use cases for different open source applications.

In fact, for some local governments, it's the working together part of open source, and not necessarily using the applications themselves, that saves money. Bryant tells of Polk County, Ore. CIO Dean Anderson, who set up a project on the popular open source repository Sourceforge.net so that several counties and state agencies could share the development cost, not to mention the result, of software designed to collect and deliver certain geospatial and tax information to the state. Without collaboration between the counties, none could have afforded the project.

"That has always been true of local governments," Bryant says. "Small county and city governments have turned to open source when they simply would not have had the capability otherwise. They're so budget constrained."

Newport News, Va., IT director Andy Stein uses a similar approach quite often. More significant savings can be found in such collaborations than in merely using open source solutions. "When cost sharing occurs ... then additional likeminded organizations may join the consortium, the community grows, the savings and the benefits to each increase," he says.