Robert Pogson

Public education is often provided by government so many of the issues, motivations, and advantages of FLOSS are the same for both. I received a link by e-mail that discusses the views and involvement of SUN in this issue. Thanks, noreply, whoever you are.

Of course, SUN sells a lot of hardware, software and services so government is likely one of their big customers. Providing customers economical FLOSS can be difficult as SUN well knows but they seem at times good stewards of FLOSS (OpenOffice.org, VirtualBox, OpenSolaris, Java, etc.).

One thing that governments and large organizations seem to miss about FLOSS, though, is that, instead of paying for licences for software or not, they should consider actually participating in the generation of FLOSS by hiring some coders. These large organizations can thus be self-supporting. As SUN found out when they replaced M$ Office with StarOffice, a large organization can buy a whole company for less than the total bill for licences to a monopoly like M$. Government is not in the business of producing software but it is less costly to do this with FLOSS and they reduce the anxiety about who will maintain the software if they have a hand in its production. They can also have the features they want and can get the bugs out sooner. Education in Canada is fragmented with federal, provincial/territorial, municipalities and school divisions all having a hand in running and funding education so it may be harder for education to contribute to FLOSS generally but government at national levels is always big so they should choose FLOSS and contribute to it. In education, some large institutions and a few dedicated individuals do contribute but all can benefit from FLOSS.

TFA is not specific about how governments are using FLOSS but certainly on the server there is huge uptake. The desktop will come but it takes time. Even Munich which decided to go FLOSS in 2004 is still in the process of migration. The larger the organization the longer it takes to migrate because of complexity. Smaller ogranizations can migrate on a weekend. The larger organizations perhaps should set some standards for interoperability and allow their sub-units to migrate individually. Munich had 12 departments. The central IT guys are still finding stuff in corners… It might have been much faster for the central guys to require FLOSS by a set date and provided resources to each department rather than trying to make a central plan that fit everywhere. I know if a truck arrived here with 100 PCs and everything needed to make them run FLOSS, I could have it installed over a weekend. On the other hand, to get every school to participate in the planning and implementation of a one-size-fits-all system, it would take years just to do the talking.