
Majority in Bern council tells Swiss city to switch to open source - Tsiolkovsky
http://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/majority-bern-council-tells-swiss-city-switch-open-source
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roedog
The last paragraph of the story talks about how "the German city of Freiburg
voted to end the city's experiments with a free and open source office suite.
In that city, the IT department had been struggling for years to support both
an decade-old proprietary office suite as well as an outdated version of
OpenOffice. Increasing frustration by the city's civil staff prompted the city
board to revert to use only proprietary office solutions"

The conclusion I draw it that any kind of software adoption depends on how
well IT departments support it. In addition to lobbying budget conscious city
councils it is also necessary to evangalize and train the government IT
workers.

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pconf
If memory serves, and it often doesn't thee days so please don't hesitate to
correct this, the US government once drafted similar guidelines for protection
against IT vendor lock-in. The acronym was GOSIP, and it was somewhat well
adopted when Sun and IBM were popular choices. Unfortunately, those 2 big
vendors along with Apple utterly failed to capitalize on the opportunity,
addicted as they were and still are to hardware/software tie-in and associated
high margins. Microsoft just filled the gap left by it's competitors.

Sadly, no Unix or Linux vendor has shown particular aptitude at it either,
much as RH and Ubuntu have at times shown promise. But heads-up, this is the
same gap that was filled by MS and it is still open!

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swombat
Ten years ago, this would have been major news. But today?

Somehow, that seems like it's not even worthy of a news item anymore these
days. So many governments and other similar organisations seem to have done
this that it seems like a no-brainer, almost. It's great to see more
(particularly Switzerland) doing this, but the real victory here is that this
is no longer a major news item, but business as usual.

~~~
Nux
It's still very big news, unfortunately. There aren't that many that have
switched; the majority of govs around the world are still filling Micro$oft's
pockets.

~~~
biot
What if they used Linux and were filling RedHat's pockets via support
contracts? Would you adopt a "Red$Hat" spelling convention?

The "filling pockets" comment indicates that either you think making money is
bad, or you have some other argument you should have made instead.

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lumberjack
Am I wrong in saying that European countries seems to have finally realized
that they are too dependent of US companies for very imperative technology?

