Hi Otto,
thanks for the report, and for your excellent work!
On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 04:57:52PM +0200, Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
Now we discussed with Parviainen that the Greens in Tampere should make a new initiative that would simply require city IT department to install at least OpenOffice or LibreOffice in all city computers side-by-side with MS Office, so that city employees would get exposure to FOSS and also that the city would be able to process ODT-documents anywhere. This would be a small step on a path to the right direction and very likely to pass and in the long run open doors for further actions.
Based on my experience, this is a very good first step.
Installing (Open|Libre)Office on the city's computers has the advantage that the administration could then read and write documents in ODF (and most definitely couldn't tell anyone that they can't use ODF to communicate with the city administration).
Parviainen asked me to send him some arguments around the theme of increasing competition in software procurement, so that the right-wing parties would like the initiative more.
Off the top of my head:
- proprietary software can only be delivered and serviced by the company that makes it (or its intermediaries). Free Software, on the other hand, can be installed and serviced by any company with suitable knowledge.
- With Free Software, money and technological knowledge can stay in the city/region/country where the administration is based, rather than being shipped off to corporate headquarters somewhere overseas.
- If the administration buys Free Software and related services, local businesses will have much greater opportunities to do business with the public administration. That means local jobs (and more tax revenue for the local administration).
- The administration gets to decide on its own IT strategy, rather than being dependent on whatever a software vendor decides to do.
Other ideas welcome :-)
Best regards, Karsten