Slashdot Mirror
Open Source Part of Mainstream IT in Canada
Sxip writes "A recent survey of advanced technology companies indicates that Open Source software is becoming an explicit component in enterprise Information Technology (IT) strategy and architecture. Some nine out of ten respondents include Open Source in their planning."
....Rely on it. The online edition I work for has just as many Linux boxen as Windows boxen. And only 1/2 of them are serving pages. The only ones using Windows is us journalists and the suits. And we journalists could have done it with Linux as well. Although I prefer to do it (the writing, pervert! ;) with MacOS X
The mirror of http://www.cata.ca/Media_and_Events/Press_Release
Yeah, they work for Corel, Alias, Hummingbird, MKS, Cognos, Zero Knowledge, Blackberry, Nothern Telecom ...
Active State, Electronic Arts, Mainframe, etc...
Actually this is not entirely true. There is an organization in Ottawa called "Gosling" that is working to get open source software more consideration within the government. Some of the members are government employees at fairly high levels.
Canadian government procurement law is quite fair to open source, its just that day-to-day practice has been more oriented towards closed-source vendors. People have to be educated--its not necessarily easy to compare tenders between open and closed vendors--how much is it worth to not be locked in to particular software?
One thing that is very interesting is that the government is moving towards open document formats (ie XML). Openoffice can write them natively, and Word can be told to do it. One thing that I thought was cool is that they are setting up Word so that it will not actually be possible to save a document in a proprietary format.
So yeah, we're not there yet. But progress is being made.