The adoption of open-source software in governments has had its ups and downs. While open source seems like a “no-brainer”, it turns out that governments can be surprisingly resistant to using FOSS for a variety of reasons. Federico González Waite spoke in the Open Government track at SCALE 22x in Pasadena, California to recount his experiences working with and for the Mexican government. He led multiple projects to switch away from proprietary, often predatory, software companies with some success—and failure.
González Waite began by noting that he is a Mexican/Kiwi (“there’s not many of us
“, he said with a grin), who spent nine or ten years in high-level roles in the Mexican government “promoting open-source implementations
“. Among other things, he was the CTO for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; “I am actually responsible for Mexicans having an electronic passport today.
” That was one of the projects that he led and part of it was done with open-source software, which is something that people find to be amazing, González Waite said. He served in the office for national strategy under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, eventually moving into the CEO role at the National Research and Innovation Center for Mexico.
In all of his roles, he advocated using open source within the government; it is never easy to be a “change-maker” of that sort, he said. He left the government at the recent change of presidents (to Claudia Scheinbaum) and is now working on “helping people do their own transformations
” to open source, while keeping an eye out for the next big thing. He noted that he would take questions at the end and he might not be able to answer them all due to confidentiality responsibilities, but he is “no longer a public official, so that gives me a lot more leeway to talk freely
“.
Why?
So why open source for the government?
One reason is to cut costs; Mexico is a financially small, developing country that is always looking to reduce costs, he said. Paying for licensing was costing a lot of money that could be used to do other things. The López Obrador administration passed an austerity plan into law, so that various actions (e.g. government officials traveling out of the country for work) needed presidential-level approval. That also affected purchasing licenses and the plan pushed the use of open source.
Another major reason is to work toward Mexico having “IT sovereignty”. One major problem that the country has had is that its IT leadership is not technical, which means that people were signing off on projects and licenses without understanding what they were buying. “They really didn’t know if they are were getting good value for [the] money
“.
There is a need to build up the talent within the government to support open-source software; “there’s no point in building a whole infrastructure on open source if you don’t have the talent to keep it up
“. There has been a lot of effort to bring in new people and to train existing workers to that end. One goal is to go from being an IT-consumer nation to being an IT-producing nation. It is surprising to many who think of Mexico as a manufacturing and assembly nation that the country does actually produce a lot of technology, he said. Much of what was being produced within the government, though, was being siphoned off by the private sector; more recently, that is changing, so that the government can package and even sell its IT development.
