(Besoin de traduction)

The Government of Canada has released the Information Technology Strategic Plan 2016-2020, which outlines the key activities to ensure we provide secure, reliable, responsive and innovative IT services.

The word “Open” is there 10 times but no mention of “Open Source”.

Unlike the US Digital Services Playbook, that has lots of things like : ensures open source solutions are evaluated when technology choices are made and consider open source software solutions at every layer of the stack. And the popular Default to open : If the codebase has not been released under an open source license, explain why.

So what’s good for OSS in this strategy?

Where an enterprise solution to meet a common business need does not exist, departments and agencies should examine potential solutions taking into consideration total cost of ownership, ability to meet current and future business requirements, interoperability and assessing internal capacity.

For custom development, teams should adopt modern agile approaches that deliver greater speed and agility. They must also take into account the increasingly complex IT ecosystem of interdependent software architecture, infrastructure and processes. Adopt an approach that considers a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and application programming interface (API) first, rather than monolithic constructs.

Why is this only for things that are not enterprise solutions? Should’nt we also consider this when choosing an “Entrerprise Solution” in the first place?

I like the section on the Cloud

In the context of cloud, enterprise-wide and shared solutions, departments and agencies have a duty to apply safeguards that will enable them to retain uncompromised control over information they have collected or created.

Departments and agencies will need to consider vendor lock-in considerations. So it almost wants to say :

• Favor interoperability and open standards where possible and viable
• Open Source Software (OSS) solutions must be actively and fairly considered
• Estimate total lifetime cost of ownership of the solution, including exit and transition costs

For the cloud :

• Consider the cloud provider’s ability to support the use of open standards
• Application, data and support must be transferable to other cloud providers, SSC or in-house

Since SSC is working on the official position on OSS, and that OSS is already included in the Functional Direction Software Strategy given to department, I was expecting more on OSS in this plan.