The UK: Confused but enthusiastic
Spotlight Project:
Birmingham City Council, the largest
local authority in Europe, is moving 1,500 desktops and all the
associated back-end servers in its library service to open source software for a year-long trial.
Summary:
The UK public sector has generally been slower
to adopt open source than some neighbouring countries. Only 32 percent
of UK local authorities use open source software, which is less than
half the figure for France and Germany, according to a survey by MERIT.
There have been few high-profile adoptions of open source by local authorities, although this may change if the pilot project at Birmingham City Council proves successful. The London Borough of Newham considered migrating from Microsoft to open source desktops, but later changed its mind and was accused of using a Linux trial purely to force a better contract from Microsoft.
At an event earlier this year, MERIT's Ghosh described the UK government's policy towards open source as "confused". He points out that an OGC report said that using open source can generate "significant" cost savings in government, but many government departments are still determined Microsoft users. The NHS, for example, awarded a nine-year software contract, worth £500m, to Microsoft last year.
One area where the government has been more supportive about the use of open source software is in schools. Earlier this year, the British Educational Communications and Technology Association (BECTA) said that primary schools could cut computer costs by nearly half if they stopped buying, operating and supporting products from proprietary software vendors. The government is also supporting a number of projects to encourage the adoption of open source, including a wide-ranging initiative known as the Open Source Academy.
The UK's Labour government is to blame for the limited open source adoption by the public sector, says James Governor, an analyst at RedMonk. "We've been pathetic as a nation in supporting and understanding open source. [Tony] Blair's Labour has dragged us away from it — there was more support for open source products such as Apache [Web server] before Blair," says Governor. "In the UK, Bill Gates has been given a knighthood, I can't imagine him getting a Légion d'honneur in France."
Ghosh agrees that there "seems to be less political support" in the UK. There is little impetus for the government to support open source as the UK has a strong economy, according to Andrea DiMaio, a research director at Gartner.
In August the Central Scotland Police force decided to migrate from Linux to Microsoft due to "interoperability issues". Ghosh says this example shows that public sector organisations need to collaborate to increase the adoption of open source in the UK.
"Interoperability is important — organisations are not just locked in individually, but are also locked into networks of organisations. That requires a push that is beyond the level of individual organisations, which is not happening in the UK," says Ghosh.
Quick Links:
UK | US | France | Germany | Norway | Spain | Poland/Eastern Europe
Talkback
Good research.
Oh, yes the "Old Europe" countries above all France and Germany OF COURSE switch to Linux motivated by anti-Americanism. Oh, gee give me a break, will ya?
Did Dubya force you to write such a complete bullshit?
It's not Holland, but The Netherlands. :-)
The allegation that TCO is smaller in the case of proprietary software is absurd and completely false. It's based exclusively on Microsoft's so-called "ge the facts" campaign, nobody can take that as a fact without being ridiculous. In fact, independent studies show that TCO is less than half for Linux and open source than for Windows and Microsoft.
My my my. France using Opensource softwares because it's not American? Gimme a break!
Fact is, a few well-known Open-Source elements originated in a French speaking environment... Let's see: gzip, http, divx (ProjectMayo, anyone? Gej?), the decision for OOo to go multilingual (ok, so maybe that one can be discussed...)
Note: recently started, France's numeric television broadcasting uses MPEG-2 - for public channels. Private, paid-for channels use MPEG-4...
Although it's gotten out of fashion, France also was the first country to have a state-wide telematic client-server architecture open to anyone: Minitel.
So, is it so hard to understand that a country with a culture where one is supposed to think about the society's welfare in general at the same time he thinks about his own, that has gotten used to everyday use nation-wide communication systems 15 years before the rest of the world got something similar, where all credit cards carry advanced securised microchips (and have been doing so for a long time) and where software has traditionally been developed in large quantities of ideas but never easily sold, got enthusiastic in the use of F/OSS?
Actually, does anyone remember that the personal computer has been created in France, but never got past a few prototypes due to lack of funding?
So, why would France's decision to go with F/OSS, that matches its methods much more closely than pure US liberalism, just be a way to spite the Americans? Why would anybody want to do things just like the Americans do them?
As a matter of fact, has anyone tried a French-translated piece of proprietary software? Microsoft's have content mistakes, language abuses, can't spell-check worth a damn, don't consider layouts other than QWERTY... Others usually don't even bother.
So, yeah, why would French technicians (who can code quite well, but not sell it because they don't consider the financial aspect when developing something they need) endure such crappy softwares when they can just modify other softwares to suit their needs, or just make it themselves?
You can whine about it all you want, just consider one thing: French people are usually quite the 'do-it-yourself' type (systeme D is a French expression - D stands for débrouille); what better software development model than F/OSS for that?
As far as I remember, Americans started making fun of 'froggies' because France didn't agree with the war in Iraq - which was supposedly a matter of days, and should squish terrorism instantly. Now let's see...
Just a little correction:
Software libre = free software
open source = codigo abierto
The French use Pays-Bas and most English speaking people in Canada and the USA say Holland. If you want to be correct you should sat :Nederland!