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Sean Amos
Joined: Sep 12, 2006
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Open source gets European boost
June 18, 2007 - 03:44 AM
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Open source gets European boost
Larry Ellison of Oracle stands in front of a Linux poster. Some large firms like Oracle use open source software. The European Commission has added its voice to the debate about the use of open source software.
A report funded by the Commission concludes that the software could offer considerable savings to organizations with little effect on their business. The report found that in "almost all" cases long-term costs could be reduced by switching from proprietary software produced by firms such as Microsoft.However, it warned that a move to open source could increase short term costs.
This would be largely be due to increased training for users of the software, said the authors of the report who are based at the United Nations University in Maastricht.
But some proprietary manufacturers such as Microsoft do not believe that open source always means cheaper. In 2004 the company launched a campaign called Get The Facts that gave examples of where its software was cheaper and more reliable than open source products.
Open source software refers to software where the underlying programming code is made available to users to read, alter and improve. This is in contrast to proprietary software where a company controls the source code to prevent changes being made.
A great deal of open source software is produced and distributed for free by volunteer programmers, although some companies, such as Red Hat, do sell open source products and associated services to get them up and running.
The study estimates that just one-third of open source programs are produced by businesses in Europe.
Software made by volunteers includes operating systems, such as Linux, and Microsoft Office-like programs such as OpenOffice.org.
Open source programs are already used by many companies particularly to run web servers, the computers that store and deliver web pages.According to the study, the number of existing open source programs already available would have cost firms 12 billion Euros (£8 billion) to produce.
It estimates that the available programs represent the equivalent of 131,000 programmer years.
"This represents at least 800 million Euros (£525 million) in voluntary contributions from programmers alone each year," the report said. At the moment, the report said, public organizations were the dominant beneficiaries of this work. To continue this uptake, the report recommends "correcting current policies and practices that implicitly or explicitly favor proprietary software".
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Nikki
Joined: Aug 16, 2007
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Re: Open source gets European boost
December 13, 2007 - 01:26 PM
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I am really glad that Europe is coming on board with open source software. I have used open office for almost two years now and I really like it. I find that I am not really losing out by not having Microsoft Office though the formatting on .docs is a bit funny and formatting doesn't really transfer over as well. In fact I much prefer Impress to PowerPoint because it allows me to add videos to sideshows really easy. My favorite part of open source software is that if a program doesn't do something you need it to do and you or a friend has a programming background, you can change it so it does. I think in general though people have to talk more about open source software and its benefits and drawbacks as well as talk about file transfer ettiquite like sending things in RTF or PDF as a standard rather than Microsoft Office so it can be opened by more people. We need a discourse on software and what it means.
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