:Open Source Tour of Europe [Switzerland and Austria]
Open Source Tour of Europe [Switzerland and Austria] Jun 10, 2008, 03 :00 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (3720 reads) (Other stories by Matthew Aslett)
Open Source Tour of Europe: Switzerland
"Switzerland is co-hosting EURO 2008 along with Austria and will be kicking off the tournament with a game against the Czech Republic on Saturday. The country is of course famous for its neutrality but has shown itself to be less than neutral when it comes to open source (see what I did there) with the federal government having adopted an open source software strategy as long ago as February 2004.
"The policy had three core priorities: equal consideration for open source and proprietary software packages; the sharing of software among federal agencies; and the implementation of pre-requisites for open source adoption (such as standardization, technical support, training, assessment and legal considerations). Given the latter it was probably an example of one of the most forward-thinking open source software strategies..."
"Another statistic, this time from the 2002 FLOSS Report, is that 2.2% of open source developers at that time the report was written were Austrian. As the report stated: 'regarding its small population size, Austria's relative share in the open source community is however perceptibly high.'
"That was the good news. The bad news was that 'this considerable activity does however not mirror in the activity in the Austrian public sector. There are only very small projects going on.' Times change, and Austria is now home to some of the most celebrated public sector open source projects..."
