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EU IDA Study On OSS

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the making-it-work-in-the-world dept.

Werner writes ""European Commission Interchange of Data between Administration" (EU IDA) study on the use of open source software in the European public sector - you can get it in PDF or DOC."

6 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. JavaScript and Frames by BobDowling · · Score: 4, Funny

    The site requires JavaScript enabled. If it is not enabled it says that you should be running with Frames enabled. (D'oh!)

    This URL (http://ag.idaprog.org/Indis35prod/doc/333) seems to have the fundamental page.

    --
    Those who do not learn from Dilbert are doomed to repeat it.
  2. Re:.doc? by pinkNoise · · Score: 4, Flamebait
    Interesting that they publish a study on OSS in .doc, MS's *closed* doc format.

    Because free software WYSIWYG word processors are inferior, and because M$Word is the defacto standard in corporate and goverment officies.

    How many would have been able to read an AbiWord document? Or an OpenOffice document?

    They did produce a PDF too, so it's not like they are completely closing the document.

    Preferably they should have released it in plain text or HTML too, as you said, or RTF. Of course that would have lost the fancy formatting.

    Seems like we need a good open standardized WYSIWYG oriented xml based format for editing and storage. PDF and PS is a bit problematic to load into an editor... How good are the various formats used by open source word processors and office suites? Could they settle on one format to standardize?

    --
    pinkNoise

  3. OSS advertisement? by weinford · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I got the first part of the set of PDFs, and at a first glance I thought it was an advertisement for OSS projects, nothing else. It reads like "KDE is the greatest thing you've ever seen". But fortunetaly it's not so blind and lists some risks of OSS as well:
    • Lack of accountability.
    • Reduced set of supported hardware.
    • Reduced set of business applications.
    • Lack of guide-lines. (meaning "which application should i choose from the 234827525823 different ones?"
    • No guarantee that development will happen.
    • Some limitations regarding high-end installations.

    Being an OSS fan, after this I was happy enough to find a decent list of "possible reasons" to use OSS in public sectors nevertheless, most notably they found out about Security and Privacy, which they even seperated from another bonus, Freedom. Did RMS write this report? I think it is definitely worth reading!
    --

    This sig is stolen from someone who had a much better idea than I had.
  4. 'Political' Reason by Spikelalala · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Vey interesting set of arguments from one of the pdfs. A very interesting political argument for the use of OSS. In interviews most IT managers expressed worries over a dominant vendor rleationship with Microsoft and expressed a desire for alternatives from independent private vendors. Doesn't this have relevancy to the Microsoft lawsuits, especially when you consider this was published by the European Commission. Perhaps the technology directorate and the competition directorate can agree on this and launch an action with the European Court.

  5. Hmmm... by J'raxis · · Score: 5, Funny

    So the EU IDA on OSS in PDF and DOC includes the FSFs GNU and BSD UNIX but not MSFT, MS-DOS or otherwise, because of the actions by the US DOJ over MSIE, even though they FUBARed the whole thing because of W.

    HTH.

    --
    Liberty in your lifetime
  6. Mirror (available for a short time) by Stentapp · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's a mirror of the PDF documents:

    http://www.informatik.umu.se/~meson/oss-eu/

    Please use the main site if possible. Don't know if the sysadmin likes this mirror :)