And why continue to own reservation systems, especially since regulators had stopped them from fiddling with travel agents' GDS screens to place their own flights at the top?
As Anthony Zacharzewski of DemSoc has noted already in his post, Is Local GDS a Good Plan?, central government is much more coherent and biddable than 300+ different local government institutions, each with particularist political leadership, even if divided into semi-autonomous departments.
Maude's fellow ministers would go to him to overturn the decisions, but by all accounts he stood firm, backing up GDS.
The free data revolution started by Gordon Brown's government, and the Coalition's opening up of government procurement to smaller companies as well as its implementation of "agile" implementations through the Government Digital Service (GDS) has changed the face of government radically since January 2010.
Both the Lib Dems and Greens take a clear interest in both open data and the progress of the GDS.
GDS, along with coding in schools and open data, are good examples of important initiatives from both Labour and coalition governments, said investor Saul Klein of Index Ventures.
Labour's Chi Onwurah told the Guardian that, among other targets, this would involve trying to get local authorities, which presently tend to develop their own custom software, to create common platforms and share code to create efficiencies; the GDS, she says, has shown some of the way to go there.
"The potential of technology policy in Whitehall is exemplified by GDS, and that kind of open approach to technology can help the industry and the government address challenges through a transformative, open dialogue," he said.
So Lufthansa, Air France and Iberia sold most of their shares in Amadeus (the largest GDS); American Airlines sold Sabre; British Airways and KLM sold out of Galileo; and so on.However, the loss of direct commission from airlines made travel agents more beholden to the GDSs, which not only slip them a share of fees but also provide their back-office computing.
Once problems are spotted, sites can be amended quickly.In essence, the GDS is trying to bring to government the digital suppleness that occurs more naturally in the private sector.
The GDS already gets a lot of digital information remotely—how many people use the services, at what stage they give up a multi-step process.
