Europe and the US philosophically divided on open source?
Published: 08 Nov 2005 11:15 GMT
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
Previous
Did you find this article useful?
262 out of 511 people found this useful
Digg
Slashdot
Del.ici.ous
Stumble
Reddit
Full Talkback thread
7 comments
-
Good research. Arthur B. -
Oh, yes the "Old Europe" countries above all Franc... Anonymous
-
It's not Holland, but The Netherlands. :-) Anonymous
-
The French use Pays-Bas and most English sp... Jacob -
The allegation that TCO is smaller in the case of... Gabriel Voinea
-
My my my. France using Opensource softwares b... Mitch 74
-
Just a little correction:
Software libr... Diego Alcorta
