UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has begun a collaboration with OpenUK to offer open source guidance for the public sector.
OpenUK, which is a non-profit organisation representing the UK’s open technology sector, was contracted by UKRI to provide the guidance, covering both how the UK public sector releases and curates open source software and how public sector bodies can use and support open source software.
OpenUK said the work requires understanding of how community development and curation takes place, how to encourage maintainers and contributors to manage projects long term, and how to procure open source software.
The State of digital government review published in January covers a few examples of successful UK public sector open source projects. One of these is Slough Borough Council, which is using funding from Defra to plant a Digital Urban Forest. This involves installing environmental sensors among newly planted trees across 31 urban sites. The sensors will enhance environmental policy outcomes by measuring local environmental health, contributing to an open source environmental research database, and providing educational opportunities for local schools.
The Ministry of Justice’s Splink project is another project cited in the report. This tool is able to link a million records a minute for justice use cases (such as identifying pathway of offenders). It has been adopted by public and private sector organisations around the world.
Discussing the guidance, Richard Gunn, programme director of UKRI, said: “OpenUK’s recommendations highlight exciting opportunities for the UK to lead globally in supporting the development and maintenance of open source software by building on national strengths and international best practice to drive innovation and impact.”
OpenUK’s own research has shown that the UK retains its position as number one in Europe in open source software and that open source has contributed 27% of the UK’s digital gross value added (GVA), an indicator of economic performance.
According to Anil Madhavapeddy, professor of planetary computing at the University of Cambridge, technology transfer between cutting edge research and public adoption has been dramatically sped up in the past three decades by open source.
“The rise of cloud computing, large-scale data science and formal verification can all be traced back to code first written in research organisations,” he said. “We need this innovation loop more than ever now, to keep pace with advances in artificial intelligence and ensure societal impacts resulting from these are equitable and just.”
The Black Duck Open source security and risk analysis report for 2025 found that open source software is the most popular approach for developing and releasing software, while Harvard Business School researchers have reported that the open source market is worth $8.8tn. The ClearlyDefined project tracks more than 55 million software components that are available under an open source license.
“At this stage, we want to give the world a heads up on the work done so far, why it is important and what we are working on now,” said Amanda Brock, CEO at OpenUK. “The UK led with the world’s first open-source-first policy for its public sector but we haven’t kept up with change or recognised the pace of adoption.
“The work we are doing would be visionary and enable the UK, Europe’s open source leader, to again be an exemplar by putting a well-managed open source ecosystem at the heart of sustainable software infrastructure. This work would not be isolationist and has the potential of benefit beyond the UK, with global impact.”
