Norway: Fjording the open source rift
Spotlight project:
Bergen, Norway's second largest city,
is partway through a large-scale migration to Linux. It has migrated
many of its city administration and educational servers to Linux and is
moving to open source desktops in 100 schools across the city. These
desktops are used by a total of 32,000 pupils and 4,000 teachers. Once
this project is completed, it plans to migrate all desktops in the city
administration to the open source operating system.
Summary:
The adoption of open source software in the Norwegian public sector
originated in the educational sector, due to the lack of
local language support in Microsoft products, according to MERIT's Ghosh.
"The move to open source started off in the education sector and is now increasingly formalised by the Norwegian government," he says. "A few years ago all the schools in Norway threatened to boycott Microsoft if it didn't support Nynorsk [Norway's second language]. Microsoft supported it, but many schools moved to open source anyway."
Over 100 schools in Norway use Skolelinux, a version of Linux that has been customised for schools. Although Bergen is one of the best known cities in Norway to migrate to open source, the city of Sarpsborg, in the southeast of Norway, is already running Linux on all its systems, according to Ole-Bjørn Tuftedal, the chief technology officer of Bergen.
The Norwegian government announced in June that all public sector organisations must have a plan for how they will use open source software by 2006, although Gartner's DiMaio says this does not necessarily mean that the organisations will migrate to open source. "The plans may well be, 'we're not going to use open source,' but they must have clear plans," says DiMaio.
Eirik Chambe-Eng, the president of Norwegian software company Trolltech, says the Norwegian government's adoption of open source has been stimulated by the introduction of new IT systems over recent years.
"There has been a big push to modernise the way the government uses IT in Norway," says Chambe-Eng. "Starting fresh means that there is a possibility to change course and look at the advantages of new approaches."
MERIT's Ghosh says the Norwegian government's encouragement of open standards has impacted the adoption of open source in the public sector, as open source applications often use open standards, while proprietary applications may not.
The announcement in June by the Norwegian government also spoke about open standards, calling for all public sector IT systems to use open standards for documents by 2009.
"Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government," said the Norwegian Minister of Modernisation, Morten Andreas Meyer, at a press conference in Oslo, according to an EU news site.
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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!