PHP in Public Sector

I’m at the one of the most notable PHP conferences put on each year, the Zend/PHP Conference & Expo. I’ve done a lot of networking and met a lot of wonderful people…particularly many of people on the Zend team and the one thing I can’t help but note is that so far in this conference and during the entire conference in DC I have yet to meet another public sector employee. This is of major concern because the public sector has the most to gain from open source technology and, specifically, PHP. Part of this can be blamed on the past strategic vision of Zend and based on everything I’ve heard so far this week, Zend does plan on engaging government more. However that alone is not going to be enough.

I’m convinced that any state that employ in-house IT staff and doesn’t have an open source strategy is missing out on tremendous opportunities to lower costs in any number of areas. More strongly, I’d argue they are wasting taxpayer money but not looking into open source alternatives to help meet their IT needs. As it pertains to this conference, I’ve seen only a few web applications during my tenure at the State of Iowa where PHP couldn’t have met the needs of the requesting agency. Those situations where PHP didn’t fit were where there were unique needs such as the ability to bridge to MQ Series or where load balancing, failover, etc was needed (our PHP environment isn’t setup to do this). Smaller states like Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, etc simply do not have the populations needed to degrade the performance of well engineered PHP applications as thus, spending the license fees for web technologies doesn’t make a lot of sense. Or, if they insist on vendor supported technologies, they should look into companies that employ a for-profit open source model like MySQL, RedHat and Resin. I’m not suggesting that the entire IT space needs to be 100% open source but not considering how open source software can benefit government is a misuse the trust of citizens.

This leads into my rant about the upcoming elections. While making your choice on who should fill the various political offices this November please factor in support for open source software. Furthermore, support for open document standards should be a factor as well as IT corporations continue to try to hold data hostage by wrapping it up in proprietary kruft that makes access data either impossible or very expensive. Another word for this is vendor lock-in which has no place in government. Through voting and pushing for open source in the political process I can only hope that in a few years more federal, state and local government workers will be participating in great conferences like this one.