The Government pledged in future to buy software based on open standards yesterday, but said this did not mean it would only buy "open-source" products.

Minister of State with responsibility for the information society, Ms Mary Hanafin, said the Government would publish an online catalogue of all open-standards used in the public services broker. The broker is a key piece of technology architecture that will link 15 Government departments and their agencies and enable consumers to interact via the internet with Government.

The Government made a decision to contract the consultancy firm BearingPoint to build the broker earlier this year using open-software standards. It rejected a bid by Accenture that was based on Microsoft software.

An open standard is one that is owned by no company and used by all. It does not attract a licence fee when it is used and often links into different software products.

A good example is the internet standard HTML, which is managed by the World Wide Web consortium and is used in the construction of internet pages.

Open-source software is becoming increasingly popular among national governments as a means to cut costs.

It often attracts no fee for use unlike its main rival Microsoft, which charges for many of its key software releases such as Office.