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the IT department had been struggling for years to support both an decade-old proprietary office suite as well as an outdated version of OpenOffice.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.
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!
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.
I think the adoption of open source for national and local governments worldwide is still very much into single digits - low single digits, at best. Until we get like at least 30%-40% of world's institutions to switch to open source, I think this is still very much news, and it encourages others to think about it, too.
And 10 years ago this probably wasn't even "news" because nobody cared about this. This is what's great about an economic crisis, too. When times are "good" people don't really care about switching to something else, if the status quo "works", but when it's an economic crisis, the adoption of cheaper disruptive technologies accelerates, and that's one of the "benefits" of an economic crisis - trimming down the fat, increasing efficiency, and switching from the incumbent technology to the disruptive one at the time.
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.
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?
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.