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Massachusetts Adopts Open Standards Strategy
prostoalex writes "The state of Massachusetts at a meeting of state information officers adopted a broad-based strategy to move to open standards. The strategy does involve Linux among other open standard solutions, while moving away from Microsoft-based platforms is one of the decisions. State Administration and Finance Secretary Eric Kriss insisted that decision was made on technical grounds and had nothing to do with antitrust investigation of Microsoft by the state of Massachusetts."
Interesting that the article focuses on the "cost" issue of Linux while skirting the inherent problems with soverenty and transparency that proprietary software poses to governmental institutions.
As an IT professional, I do see that Open Source solutions do in fact save money in the longer term. Five years ago my organization was using mostly closed-source products... and our software budget was several thousand dollars per developer per year.
Today my IT development organization is virtually 100% open source. We're running Linux on the desktop and use open source development tools. Our software costs have dramatically fallen. Nope, we don't even use MS-Exchange or MS-Office.
If we extend this to the average user's desktop (versus just developers), we could see an even greater savings. And yes, we're working on it.
Saving money is always a good thing. Again, even the wealthiest of states, such as Massachusetts, need to save money given the very bad state of the US economy.
Other states may want to investigate this strategy in order to save $$$.