Nice little bit of news here that HM Government is looking to go into Open Source…

UK government backs open source

Obviously they are looking at the “free as in beer” aspect to save a few pennies after shelling out huge amounts to various banks.

I’d be curious if they take this any further, as my understanding is that if a piece of GPL/LGPL/APL? software lands on a Third Party clients environment, all of the source code should be available to the Third Party, including the bespoke IP.

That is if you get to use a Government application which lands a piece of Open Source software on your PC, you have the right to see the code of the whole thing.

To be quite honest, developers being developers, I’d be utterly gobsmacked if this wasn’t the case already, but it would be interesting to see if they’ve thought through the implications…

BTW if you reead the BBC article,? it’s nice to see Ingres getting a mentch. I’ve always had an affection for it, esp as it’s the first relational database I used in anger….