The EU Comission has published a report called, succintly, “Study on the Economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU“. Here is the beef:
“Our findings show that, in almost all the cases, a transition toward open source reports of savings on the long term – costs of ownership of the software products.” (from section 12.7.)
What is more, programs like OpenOffice are effective, as well:
“Our findings report no particular delays or lost of time in the daily work due to the use of OpenOffice.org…. OpenOffice.org has all the functionalities that public offices need to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.”
More discussion here.
2 Comments
I get a kick, kind of, out of the fact that somebody had to study this to come to this conclusion. ;> Yes, OpenOffice.org works a lot like Microsoft Office and it’s free. Thus, one saves time, and it’s not a huge effort to make the transition.
There is a term in Finnish, “nollatutkimus”, “zero-research”, for this kind of science. Everybody knows the result in advance, but the research has to be made in order fot the knowledge to ne “scientific”.
It is encouraging to see the many migrations to GNU/Linux and OpenOffice happening especially in the European public sector these days. A lot of people seem to be worried or displeased with some of the features in Vista, which might give an additional nudge towards FOSS.
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