COMHAIRLE CONTAE ÁTHA CLIATH THEAS
SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

south dublin county council crest

MEETING OF SOUTH DUBLIN COUNTY COUNCIL

Monday, January 14, 2013

QUESTION NO.8

QUESTION: Councillor D. Looney

To ask the Manager for an update on the utilisation of Open Source Software from my question on notice at the December 2011 meeting (Item 29848), and to make a statement on the matter.

REPLY:

South Dublin County Council utilises a growing number of Open Source technologies and continues to research the further implementation of same.  The Local Government sectoral strategy has mandated that open source is the first choice for software provision unless there are technical, functional, or financial reasons why one would not use open source.  This Council is about to embark upon the preparation of a new ICT and Data Strategy which will formally address the use of open source within South Dublin County Council and set out short to medium term plans of the utilisation of same.

In December 2012 South Dublin County Council launched the new corporate website www.sdcc.ie which has been redeveloped using an Open Source content management solution called Drupal. However open source content management is not new to South Dublin County Council.  The previous website was built on top of the Mambo open source content management system which we understand to have been the first implementation of open source content management on a Local Government website in Ireland.

We continue to use the following open source products; ushahidi (fixyourstreet), drupal (Libraries and Council web sites), postgres SQL database (fixyourstreet and spatial data processing), Ubuntu Linux (fixyourstreet), MySQL database (fixyourstreet), pHp (fixyourstreet), dSpace (libraries archival project), Moodle (eLearning System), various desktop open source tools such as Libre Office (limited deployment), and the Gnu Image Processor.

The Council's desktop technology is ageing (10 years old) and whilst we continue to sweat the most from our investment in this technology and have not been generally bound by licencing agreements since 2005, it is becoming apparent that perhaps in the next 12 - 24 months, the Council will require a new and modern desktop infrastructure.  To this end we will over the course of 2013 examine the open source alternatives to our present Microsoft desktop infrastructure and the impact of such a move over the criteria previously mentioned of technical, functional, and financial and on the basis of the Local Government Sectoral Strategy that Open Source software is in the first instance the product of choice.

Another project which has been initiated recently is an evaluation of the Council's email infrastructure and as of January 2013 we are beginning a limited pilot of an open source replacement based on commonly available industry standard and scalable open source technologies.  There are the potential cost savings, should the solutions being evaluated or proposed to be evaluated be found to be suitable, of hundreds of thousands of Euro (based on previous experiences of enterprise agreements required by this organisation) however the technical and functional requirements cannot be underestimated in what a modern organisation's IT infrastructure requires and it remains unclear as to the overall suitability of some open source products.  Nevertheless, the Council's experience with open source products thus far has been broadly satisfactory and every opportunity will be afforded to the open source products which are available to us.