Powys County Council
& Open Source Software

Open Source Software is software that has been developed by the world-wide Internet community and made available for the benefit of all other Internet users. It is typically available for anyone to download and use without cost. (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/).

It's effective:

The Open Source Software applications we use have proved themselves over a number of years. Some of the Open Source products we use are acknowleged as leaders in their field, such as the Apache Web Server, which is by far the most commonly used Web Server software in use on the Internet. Other products, whilst perhaps not "cutting edge" are still very capable at the job they set out to do. And keeping software simple but effective is the key to having computer systems that are easy to support and operate.

We currently have over 150 servers in regular production use running Linux. They provide Internet and intranet web services, email services, DNS, LDAP directory services, database servers and other "network appliance" roles.

It's affordable:

The software itself is free, so there can be some significant savings to be made there. But there are savings elsewhere too:

• there is no need for administrative processes to keep track of who has legal licenced copies, which we have to do with commercial software
• if there is an upgrade to the product, then we can make it available to all without any software upgrade costs
• and if we see no reason to upgrade, we are not under any pressure to do so
• often, these applications will run on less expensive or older computer hardware than is demanded by more sophisticated commercial applications

We get what we want:

By carefully picking a combination of software applications from the great number of Open Source products that are available, we can provide solutions that are a good match for our needs. Proprietary solutions may give us little or no choice over what comes with the package. And because we are not constrained by licensing costs, we can roll out solutions that are technically the best approach even in situations such as small community centres where we could never justify the cost of commercial systems.