Information Research Weblog

An item about the use of open source software in Vienna drew my attention to a study of open software in governments in the US and Europe on the ZDNet site. This is a very useful set of pages for anyone who wants to know something of the scale of change. Typically, of course, there's less government support for open source in Blair's Britain than in the rest of Europe. The writers point out that in Britain Bill Gates was given an honorary knighthood, whereas in France he'd be very unlikely to get the Legion d'Honneur!

The numbers are interesting:

Only 32 percent of UK local authorities use open source software, which is less than half the figure for France and Germany,

The French public sector has enthusiastically adopted open source, with three quarters of French local authorities using open source software, according to the MERIT survey. A number of ministries are also using open source, including the Defence, Culture, Agriculture, Equipment and Finance ministries.

Nine out of every 10 German local authorities are using open source software

The Spanish region of Extremadura is using Linux on 70,000 PCs and 400 servers in schools and is now deploying the open source operating system on 14,000 PCs and 34 servers at hospitals and health centres across the region.

While, outside of Europe and the USA:

The Chinese government plans to deploy over 140,000 Linux PCs in primary and secondary schools across the Jiangsu province. The deal was announced by Sun Wah Linux in October 2005 and is thought to be the largest Linux desktop roll-out in Asia.

The Indian government is funding an initiative to distribute millions of free CDs containing open source software. Around 3.5 million CDs Tamil-language versions of open source applications and 3.5 million Hindi-language CDs containing have already been distributed. And there are further plans to distribute software translated into all 22 official languages of India.

There have been a number of large scale migrations in Brazilian states, for example, the state of Parana is migrating 10,000 government employees from proprietary software to a customised version of the open source collaboration application eGroupWare and São Paulo has deployed Linux on 16,000 PCs and 1,000 servers in schools across the state,

Much of the development is taking place in school systems, so we might guess what the next generation of young techies is going to be interested in.

Isn't it time someone did a paper on this phenomenon for Information Research?