Open source shunned by UK government

The UK government has turned its back on open source technology in its public key infrastructure (PKI) trials.

The Office of the E-envoy has just completed the second round of trials with vendors including Baltimore, Entrust and RSA.

However, Netproject, an organisation which promotes open source in ebusiness and one which was extremely confident of being included in the trials, has been locked out - a decision the company's director, Eddie Bleasdale, said left him "seething with rage".

Bleasdale told silicon.com: "There has got to be a change in culture. The government is responsible for some terrible disasters and has found itself locked into Microsoft. The biggest threat to PKI is .Net."

The government has now admitted it needs to looks at ways of reassessing its processes in order to be more inclusive of open source.

It considers the technology to be so important that it actually made funding available to an open source representative for the trials through a tendering process.

But neither Netproject nor Linux specialist Red Hat managed to get through the tendering process, missing out on the cash and a place in the trials.

Steve Marsh, director of security policy at the Office of the E-envoy, told silicon.com: "Next time we will look more closely at what we need to take this forward. I'm still very keen that we encourage open source whenever we can and ensure a level playing field."

PKI is a crucial ingredient in getting all government services online by 2005. To ensure information transferred via the internet is kept confidential and that the identities of senders and recipients are authenticated, the private sector has been enlisted to help find a suitable PKI solution.

The programme is being run by the CESG (Communications-Electronics Security Group) and overseen by the Office of the E-envoy.