Conservatives Back Linux.
I was reading the latest edition of “Computer Shopper” today and noticed, in the news section, that Linux got the Conservatives vote.
As a Linux user myself, Ubuntu to be precise, I find it quite encouraging that Governments/political parties all over the world find open-source quite attractive. Take the French Parliament for example, they plan to use Ubuntu from June 2007.
According to this article which I read, it suggests that if open-source software was used in the “public sector it would save tax payers over £600 million”. That is an awful lot of money!
Surely the Government can see that it would save them a lot of money. They will most probably shell out millions each year for certain systems to be setup in Government run organisations etc when really they could reduce the cost significantly with the use of open-source software.
Another thing which stood out to me in the article was that on average open-source software cut primary schools IT costs by about 50%. That is a huge saving for schools if you ask me. Ok, I admit that not every piece of software which is on every Windows comptuer will be available on Linux, but if there are alternatives for the programs that are used surely it is worth a go. I know that it wouldn’t be practical in my school as there are too many pieces of software which aren’t available for Linux, but I am sure you get what I am saying.
[...] thought I would take this time to link to some stuff around the web. Aidan commented on how the Conservative party approves Linux…its good to see a Political Party getting [...]
It’s times like this I am proud to be a conservative.
The Brazilians have already adopted this technique, back in 2005 much of the government and scholaring software was converted to open source including the eradication of windows in favour of linux (Although sadly, the article I read did not state which distributions they planned to use).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4602325.stm
Although acceptance of such a change here would probably be slim to none due Microsoft’s 90% monopoly in the U.K market I feel that it is a good step forward for the conservative party to promote the open source movement.
@Nick – Haha, I don’t want to make it know which party I am for but I think it is a great to see a political party getting behind something which could save the average person an awful lot of money.
@Shaun – I didn’t realised that the Brazillians had adopted this, although, with them being a poor country it is a great that they have opted for the open-source alternative, it will have saved them an awful lot of money.
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However, like you say, open-source will never be as big as what Microsoft is