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Internet & IT / open-source
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2002-12-27 03:06:48-05
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Largest Danish county selects text-standard supported by Open-Source software
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Microsoft stronghold avoided, millions of software-dollars to be saved in Danish public administration. Is Asia to follow trends?
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Maybe it is no coincidence that it happened for countrymen to the author of "The Emperor's New Clothes". "Teknologiraadet", the Danish council of IT-advisory couldn't see it. Neither could Mr. Jens Ole Hald, IT-director for Hanstholm County, Denmark. Nor Mr. Mogens Engsig-Karup, IT-director for Aarhus County, the largest county in Denmark. What they couldn't see was exactly why it would be justified to select new standards recommended by (and in praxis proprietary to) Microsoft, thereby being forced to pay high prices for MS products. Teknologiraadet's report from October concludes that the The Danish public sector could save billons of DKR (hundreds of millions of US$) on switching to open-source products ("OSPs"). Consequentially Mr. Hald and Mr. Engsig-Karup headed decisions that the standard to be used for text in their counties is now Word-97, a standard that is supported by many products, among those MS Office but also Sun's "Star Office", an OSP that costs much less than MS Office. In praxis the functionality of the two products are so similar that few users will experience any difference. Furthermore "Informatik-kontoret" (the Danish governmental office for IT-coordination and -implementation) will in the future support Star Office. As a consequence of the dramatic saving by choosing Star Office instead of MS Office, Mr. Engsig-Karup expects that the majority of workers in the public administration will be upgrading to Star Office in spring 2003. OSPs are much cheaper (usually free), tend to be more stable and secure, are free from MS-marketing related tricks and long proven to do the work. OSPs are produced by large communities of programmers worldwide. They are increasingly taking market share from traditional software products because of their renowned stability and security. Since the source code - unlike for most commercial products - is available to anyone it is scrutinized by hundreds of people for security holes and bugs. Examples of OSPs are FreeBSD/Linux, PHP, MySQL and Apache which already powers more than 60% of the worlds web-servers and also dominates the majority of servers of the largest corporations in the world. Despite heavy marketing, MS seems unable to penetrate and continuously looses marketshare according to renowned Netcraft's survey. http://www.netcraft.com/survey/ In Asia the interest for OSPs appears to be strongly increasing. When "Thai Linux Extensions" was distributed last year in a shopping mall thousands of people showed up. 'Lek', an English-student on Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, wrote on Sanook.com's webboard: "Earlier we thought we needed Microsoft and appealed to them to price their products so students could afford them. They refused and many students felt forced to become illegal users. With the open-source community we have now a strong alternative. My home computer now runs Red Had Linux. All software is legal and it serves me absolutely fine. I don't think I will ever install Windows again." With MS's wealth to influence decisions it is unlikely that decision makers in the public sector in some countries in Asia are likely to make decisions allowing users to switch away from MS products any time soon. But like once for Windows itself: the changes may come from below, from a forest of cost-conscious private users.
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