Britain opens the doors to open source
p2pnet news view Open Source | Politics:- Britain’s minister for digital engagement, Tom Watson, is opening the door to open source software so it’ll be, “on a level playing field with proprietary software such as Windows,” says the BBC.
It’ll be adopted “when it delivers best value for money”, he said, according to the story, which goes on »»»
According to some in the open source industry, the shift from proprietary standards could save the government £600m a year.
The government’s action plan could see a wave of open source software being deployed in areas such as office applications (word processing and spreadsheets), document management and database infrastructure, the backbone of many large-scale IT systems.
Steve Shine, European vice president of Ingres, an open source support vendor, said the government’s action plan had “more teeth” than policies being adopted in other countries because the plan was tied into policies regarding how IT managers procure new software.
The move was partly driven, “by a series of high-profile IT failures in recent years that had relied on proprietary software,” says the story.
“Open source can help avoid many of the hidden costs of proprietary software such as making organisations re-pay for licences if they want to shift use of a particular piece of software from one place to another,” it has Watson stating.
“This is irrelevant in the open source world.”
Tom Watson – Dear Andy Burnham: On X-rated Net sites , December 30, 2008
BBC – UK government backs open source, February 25, 2009
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March 2nd, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Good on them. A couple years back, I showed my Uncle (mid-management) what OpenOffice was. He was impressed enough to bring it up at a staff meeting and right now he is enjoying his bonus of half what the company saved. Nowadays there is very little reason to not switch for the normal programs like these. I don;t know much about Gimp and Photoshop, but I can see Photoshop staying on top if only becasue of all the modules/add-on’s.