Munich Shows How Open Source Saves Big Money

Recently I've written about several moves towards mandating openness in various ways - in the UK, Spain and Portugal. That's all well and good, but what people want to know is whether moving to open solutions brings benefits - in particular, whether it saves money. Fortunately, we have a long-running experiment being carried out by the city of Munich that provides us with some hard data.

On Open Enterprise blog.

A Tale of Two Lock-ins

Yesterday I was reviewing Mozilla's current position in the browser sector and its wider achievements in the Web world. One thing I omitted to mention there was that even if it did nothing more for the rest of its existence - unlikely given its current fecundity - it would still deserve our thanks for what it managed to accomplish in the early years of its life.

On Open Enterprise.

Fewer EU Patents: Good - and Bad

First the good news:

Last year, the European Patent Office (EPO) issued far fewer patents than in 2006. The Munich patent authorities have announced that they approved exactly 54,699 patent applications for commercial protection, 12.9 per cent fewer than in the previous year. EPO President Alison Brimelow says the drop is the result of a new focus on the quality of patents rather than quantity; patent applications actually increased by 3.9 per cent to 140,700. She said her office is making sure that the temporary monopoly rights granted are actually relevant. She says the figures show that the EPO is headed in the right direction.

Well, maybe, but heise online also has this to say:

Nonetheless, the EPO staff's morale seems to have never been lower. A survey conducted among several thousand staff members found that only 4 per cent have faith in the management board. Only 6 per cent said they were satisfied with their direct superiors and the president. The auditors have also long been complaining that they are chronically overworked.

Last April, Brimelow herself complained that the backlog of work at the EPA and the other two largest patent offices in the US and Japan was only growing and could no longer be handled by current staff.

So fewer patents may well simply be the result of the fact that the EPO is getting swamped, and that quality will actually go down, not up. In any case, the EPO's own cries for help demonstrate that the idea of giving the EPO any more power through a unified European patent system is madness.

Munich Makes Good

On Open Enterprise blogs.

ODF - Nochmals "Ja, Danke"

Interesting:

In his words of welcome Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called ODF "a completely open and ISO-standardized format." It was thus an "excellent basis" for "a free exchange of knowledge and information in a time of globalization," he declared. This in turn was a necessary ingredient of the knowledge society, he averred. Within the Federal Government the Federal Foreign Office is considered the strongest proponent of free software. After having early on networked its foreign missions with the help of open-source programs and migrated its laptops to Linux and OpenOffice the Federal Foreign Office intends to extend its program of migration to all workstations of its diplomats by the middle of next year.

Open Source Jahrbuch 2006: Ja, Bitte

Although there's plenty written about free software and open source, there's relatively little in the form of books that try to offer a synoptic view. This makes the annual Open Source Jahrbuch, particularly valuable. As for 2004 and 2005, this year's is freely available as a PDF.

As you might expect, it is planned with a Germanic thoroughness, weighing in at 500 pages. As well as big names like Eben Moglen and Larry Lessig, it has a host of less well-known writers, who nonetheless have interesting things to say. I particularly liked the details of the famous Munich LiMux project, and the corresponding project in Vienna, WIENUX. Also good is the article on open source community building, which analyses several smaller projects.

I was pleased to see plenty of space given to both open content and open access. As readers of this blog have heard ad nauseam, there exists an important commonality between these opens, and it's gratifying to see open source's younger siblings getting some recognition here.

All-in-all, I'd go so far as to say that this is the best book on open source that has been published in the few years or so. Taken together, the whole series of Yearbooks form perhaps the most important collection of writings on open source and related areas to be found in any language.

The Fabulous LiMux

The migration to GNU/Linux by the city of Munich has become a thing of fable ever since it was mooted, so it's good to get some hard facts on what exactly they're up to. There's no doubt that the LiMux project will be an important test-bed for making such a move. Let's hope it all works out.

Munich Lives!

As I noted before, Munich's much-bruited migration to open source has not been entirely wrinkle-free; but the good news (well, for the free world at least), is that things seem to be moving at last, and definitively:

After a city-wide test and pilot phase, the [GNU/]Linux team of the IT Department gave the start signal on Tuesday for the first official version of the future workplace system.

Freedom, in Other Words

Recently the blogosphere went slightly bonkers over a story that "the Korean government plans to select a city and a university late next month where open-source software like Linux will become the mainstream operating programs." It seems to have been the concept of a "Linux city" that really caught people's attention (though surely "Linux city" must refer to Helsinki?). But the significance of this announcement is perhaps not quite what most people think.

As the article rightly pointed out, there's nothing new in the idea of a city powered by free software: the much-ballyhooed Munich conversion to open source was along the same lines. And there are plenty of other, smaller-scale deployments that show that free software is up to the job. But there is another element in this story that is in some ways more interesting.

Yes, open source can now offer all the usual elements - operating system, browser, email, office apps - that people need for their daily computing; but even more impressively, it can do this in many languages. In other words, there is now a multi-dimensional depth to free software: not only in terms of the apps that have been created, but also with regard to the languages in which many of those apps are available natively.

For example, Firefox boasts versions in languages such as Asturian, Basque, Macedonian and Slovenian, with several others - Armenian, Gujarati and Mongolian - listed as "Not Yet Available", implying that they will be. OpenOffice.org does even better, offering versions in languages such as Albanian, Azerbaijani, Galician, Khmer and Sango (new to me). There is an even longer list of languages that includes others that are being worked on.

And if that doesn't impress you, well, you must be pretty jaded linguistically. So consider this: for many of these languages, you can download the program for three platforms: GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS X. "Get The Facts", as Microsoft loves to say; but the ones it cares to give are partial, and they strangely omit any mention of this factual strength-in-depth that only free software can offer.

Indeed, there have been various cases where national governments of smaller nations have all but begged Microsoft to port some of its products to their language, only to be refused on the grounds that it wasn't economically "viable" to do so. Which just goes to show how complicated is the warp and weft of software and power, culture and money.

Viability has never been much of an issue for free software; if it had been, Richard Stallman would never have bothered starting it all off in the first place. As far as he is concerned, there's only one word that matters, whatever the language, and that's freedom. As the sterling work underway to produce localised versions of open source software emphasises, that includes the freedom to work in your own tongue.