Switzerland is a Developing Country regarding OSS adoption
Today I studied a little bit Red Hat’s and Georgia Tech’s Open Source Software Potential Index . The nice map illustrates the international adoption of open source software (OSS) in the three different areas: government, industry, and community. As their scientific paper describes data was drawn from an enormously broad range of sources .
So I took the country rankings and ordered them by government adoption (which is interesting to me at the moment ). As can be seen in the table (PDF , ODS , XLS ), Switzerland falls back extremely far. While being 22nd in the overall ranking (which already is very bad considering being 7th in the ICT environment), the government’s OSS adoption is on rank 34 . As can be seen in the data, there is only one lower rank, 45. Thus we’re basically second last in worldwide OSS adoption, a real developing country - one more reason to help our public administrators a little bit in their efforts procuring software in a way that enables OSS solutions as well…
Appeal against unfair Microsoft-placing in preparation
As the Tagesanzeiger reported tonight we’re preparing an appeal at the federal administrative court against the recent 42-million-placing of the federal administration with Microsoft (official press release ).
Unfortunately such a legal step is necessary because Swiss public administration is still not realizing its uncompetitive behavior as this new case in the Bernese administration shows: My canton is planning to spend 80 million CHF for its new IT infrastructure . They intend to procure the new software publicly - except for Windows and Office ! I really don’t get it. Yesterday’s report in the NZZ online (printed newspaper today) again shows clearly the benefits of Solothurn’s successful open source strategy saving over 1 million CHF a year .
Update 2009-05-12: Broad media coverage of the announcement:Tagesanzeiger/Der Bund/Basler Zeitung NZZ online Radio DRS Golem.de Netzwoche Linux Community inside-it.ch Computerworld Schweiz WinFuture.de pro-linux
Update 2009-05-12: NZZ reports on same issue in SBB, Swiss IT media reacts:NZZ on Microsoft at SBB without public procurement inside-it.ch iTReseller InfoWeek
Swiss Parliamentarians found Group for Digital Sustainability
Two years of lobbying for open source software in Swiss departmental and national politics finally reached a next milestone. This week the following six parliamentarians (Nationalräte) founded the cross-party parliamentarian group “Digital Sustainability” coordinated by the Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open :
Walter Donzé (Nationalrat EVP Kt. Bern) Edith Graf-Litscher (Nationalrätin SP Kt. Thurgau) Kathy Riklin (Nationalrätin CVP Kt. Zürich) Alec von Graffenried (Nationalrat Grüne Kt. Bern) Christian Wasserfallen (Nationalrat FDP Kt. Bern) Thomas Weibel (Nationalrat GLP Kt. Zürich)
Next to the legislative politicians also pioneers in public open source diffusion such as François Marthaler , member of the governing council of Vaud, as well as Kurt Bader from Solothurn attended the meeting.
We spent a nice dinner in the Café Fédéral after the first day of the Sondersession analyzing the previous political proposals and discussing various possibilities on how to continue:
It’s also great to notice that the topic of open source software becomes more and more diffused into media for government officials (see article on SGVW portal) and private persons (see article in the current issue of WOZ) .
Update 2009-05-04: Nice reactions from the European ICT community on our today’s press releases in German and French :heise.de Linux Magazin Open Source Observatory Golem.de inside.it Computerworld InfoWeek iTReseller
