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UK Government Boosts Open Source Adoption
Cameron Logie writes "The UK Government has today announced full backing for greater adoption of Open Source solutions in the public sector. According to the article at the BBC News site, 'Government departments will be required to adopt open source software when "there is no significant overall cost difference between open and non-open source products" because of its "inherent flexibility."'"
Easier than training them to use Office 07. All my younger new hires get OOo and they work fine with it once they realize possible hangups over file formats.
It could easily be argued that since these are government projects, paid for by our taxes, that they should prefer options where their funding gives more overall value to the public.
As such, even if it were somewhat more expensive to pay a team of coders to add 'feature X' to OpenOffice than to use MS Office with 'feature X' already included, they should still consider doing so in order to contribute both 'government services' and improved software to the public, as opposed to contributing 'government services' to the public and funding for software development to a private company.
Todays headlines are the result of *years* of work behind the scenes.
The UK Opposition party, the Conservatives, are absolutely serious about implementing an Open Source, Open Standards, Open Procurement policy should they win the next election.
Government departments are increasingly talking about sustainability (ie "we've run out of money") with Becta being the first to actually do something about it (appoint Sirius as the first and only Open Source company on a Government procurement list).
There is at least one National Open Source infrastructure project just about to come out of stealth mode, and politicians are smelling some positive press commentary for once.
This may be an essentially defensive move in the light of George Osborne's recent pronouncements, but it will inevitably lead to real progress in the historically extremely difficult (for Free Software) political scene in the UK.
Many government websites in Brazil are hosted on Zope and Plone (I work as a part-time consultant for one of them). There is an open-source turn-key solution for legislative bodies freely available and used by hundreds of them (it's also Zope-based and I did some consulting for them too). Several huge databases run on PostgreSQL clusters - chances are if you filed a tax report in Brazil, a lot of your data now resides on a PostgreSQL server. As of our last election, all electronic voting ballots ran Linux. With about 120 million inhabitants, any federal agency here is easily the size of a medium country or a huge company.
That said, there is still a long way to go and a lot of steering to keep us on the right course.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I've looked into Microsoft licensing for a number of things in the past and a few of the clauses make for interesting reading.
Let me preface this by saying I'm in the UK, I've been speaking to MS UK and it's them this information comes from. I have no idea how well these terms would stand up in a court of law or how flexible they are if you've got government-sized budgets but.... if you want an educational license - or, for that matter, one of the more flexible enterprise license schemes, one of the terms of the license is you MUST buy a license for every computer that's physically capable of running the software.
Every PC, every laptop, even every x86-based Mac.
Of course you can go down the "Open" licensing route which (AFAIK) has no such rule but while I haven't priced it up, I bet it quickly becomes drastically cheaper not to.
Suddenly, OpenOffice doesn't look like such a cost saver unless you roll it out to everyone. Nor does Ubuntu.
I once had a user request training after their old keyboard was replaced with a new one. I wish I were joking.