It takes more than digitization

It is to be welcomed that "digitization" appears so frequently in the coalition agreement. Germany really does need a much more active IT policy so that Europe's economically strongest country does not regularly find itself at the bottom of Europe-wide comparisons.

However, it appears that the financial resources to be budgeted will flow in the same way as before: into IT systems characterized by the dominance of a few providers of proprietary software.

As the report by "Investigate Europe" and a corresponding ARD program recently showed again, Germany is a colony in IT times.

Open source brings transparency

Successful digitization needs more than fiber optic cables. The repeated attacks on government IT systems show that IT security and digital sovereignty are of central importance.

To achieve these goals, trustworthiness is needed, and this is not achieved by blind trust in manufacturers of proprietary software, but only by the possibility of independent testing and modification.

In its catalog of measures, the Open Source Business Alliance therefore calls on the future German government to reverse its current IT policy. In contrast to proprietary software, the code of open source programs can be checked for its actual functions.

This is a compelling necessity to ensure that software does only what it is supposed to do. And it is the elementary basis for critical communication and network structures, which, under the term "kritis," include not only government IT.

In addition, the verifiability of the code is also the basic prerequisite for granting citizens "full transparency and control" over their personal data, as the future federal government intends to do.

Every user, every organization can (have) reprogram open source software at any time. This frees from dependence on individual software manufacturers.

This means that requests for program enhancements do not fail due to proprietary providers and their interests. Changes and further developments can also be made available to other authorities and companies so that they can develop their own innovations and offerings based on them.

Duty to open standards

Where the use of open source software is not possible, government IT must make the use of open standards mandatory to at least enable interoperability with open source software.

Open standards facilitate the integration of software, its improvement and extension, they make software flexible. They make it easier for software houses to compete for public contracts.

Software developed with government funding must therefore necessarily be based on open standards, and funding programs should aim to ensure that open code is created.

Due to such advantages, open source software must be awarded the contract in award procedures if the suitability and price are basically similar. We are a long way from that.

It is therefore to be welcomed that the future federal government wants to offer Open Government data on open platforms. Anything other than open and machine-readable data makes Open Data meaningless.

To ensure that all citizens, small and large companies alike, can use data with equal opportunities, we need not only fast Internet everywhere, but also equal access. We need net neutrality.