UK Councils May Dump Windows For Linux

An anonymous reader writes "Local authorities in Newham and Nottingham are expected to migrate more than 10,000 desktop computers from Windows to GNU/Linux. ZDNet has the story. "If this is seen to work in Newham, it has the potential to be a significant project, changing the perceptions of other councils," said Tim Dawes, director of local government technology consultants Nineveh."

Comments

OS is not the problem

[cerberusss]

I don't think the OS is any problem, I think the software is. If they want to stay on the open source path, they're going to have to use StarOffice or OpenOffice.

While it has very good Word im-/export, it's not yet faultless (and won't be any time soon, because of inherent limitations of OpenOffice). And you NEED that import, because otherwise you can't exchange documents outside of your department.

They could also use the excellent CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office but then they'll probably pay more $$$ for the MS Office licenses than when they make a OS+Office deal with the MS sales reps.

Either way, they'll have to solve a problem, now or in the future. Then again, Windows brings its own host of problems.

Re:OS is not the problem

[NoOneInParticular]

It might be horrendous work to update all standards and templates and such, but it is inevitable that this will happen at some point in the (near) future. The battle that is fought within the EU at the moment is not about OS (operating systems) nor about OS (open source), not even about OS (office suites), but about OS (open standards).

The situation you sketch above with migration problems for ms-office, is very scary for a government that is supposed to have some openness and accountibility. Currently nearly all governements in the western world have 'standardized' on some microsoft format, but none of these governments can actually guarentee that these documents will be available for reading in 10 years time, simply because Microsoft does not give any such guarantees. In fact, the situation you sketch with public data that is only accessible through the software made by a single company should be made illegal.

People are starting to realize the danger of this situation, that all these nice documents and templates can become unreadable simply because a commercial company decides that it is not in their interest to be compatible with their older formats. Other issues in government are proprietary database formats. In many places it is such that the data of general practitioners cannot be read in the hospital's system and vice-versa. At this point to collect a person's medical dossier, the only way is to print out everything that is known and collect it through regular mail. This simply costs lives, as ambulance personal has no way of knowing that the person who just broke a leg is on a particular type of medication that cannot be combined with particular pain-killers.

The only way out of this mess is the use of Open Standards, which is a much less controversial issue than the use of Open Source. It seems that the awareness of this issue is rising, even though many people will not let go of MS-Office willingly. At some point (which I think is not far off), it will become illigal for a governmental body to standardize on MS formats, unless MS will create an open standard of it. When this situation arises, MS will probably comply, but this does mean that suddenly the playing field is leveled, as everyone has access to the specs and can write their implementations/frontends.

However, although this (political) struggle for Open Standards is fought for a large part by the Open Source community, it is actually hampered by the community as well. Unlike Open Standards, which is non-controversial, Open Source is (This is mainly caused by economic arguments: governements want to endorse a local software industry, and open source is not much of an industry). By pushing both Open Standards and Open Source, the non-controversial point (Open Standards) is obscured by the controversial one (Open Source). It is easy to convince even the most business-friendly official that Open Standards are mandatory for a governmental body, but much more difficult to do the same for non-corporate backed software.

Ironically, if Open Standards are compulsory in government, this will be a big boost for Open Source, as then it is no longer neccessary to reverse engineer formats, and software can be evaluated on their merits (compliance to standards, functionality, price, etc.)

Thus in my opinion, by wanting to have both issues resolved at the same time, the Open Source lobby hampers its own goals. To get back on topic, although it is great that some council in the UK is starting to use open source, the issues that are raised in this discussion seems to center on the possibility of loading in proprietary formats of Star/Open Office. The important question that I miss being asked here is: On what formats does this Council standardize now?, and how are they planning to exchange information with other governmental bodies?

I'll finish this rant with a plea to the Open Source community as a whole: when dealing with governments, keep pushing Open Standards, and lobby for official stand