[ Thanks to Claus
Sørensen, OpenOffice.org for this story and link.
]
On Thursday, October 10, 2002, the Danish Board of Technology
released a report about the economic potential of using Open Source
software in the public administration; a report that showed a
potential savings of 3.7 billion Danish Kroners (500 million EUR)
over four years.
The main suggestion of the report is to use an open exchange
format for text document within a public administration so the
competition can be enhanced and the price of the software
lowered.
In the Hanstholm municipality, a pilot project started in April
howed that public workers there had no more problems using
OpenOffice.org and StarOffice instead of Microsoft Office as their
office suite and each user only needed one to one and half hour of
training to learn the OpenOffice.org office suite. The municipality
will now use OpenOffice.org and StarOffice on all of its workplaces
(200 in all) and will save 300,000 Danish Kroners (40,000 EUR) each
year in license fees. They will still use Microsoft Windows as
their operating system.
Three Danish political parties from different parts of the
political spectrum responded with a demand for Open Source pilot
projects on a larger scale within the public administrations.
And Århus county could be one of these pilot projects.
Currently they use WordPerfect, but this suite will not contain
Danish help in future versions because Danish is a too small a
market for Corel. Since Danish help is crucial, the administration
is planning to switch to OpenOffice.org.
Along the way, they should save about 10 million Danish Kroners
(1.2 million EUR) each year with the Open Source solution instead
of Microsoft Office. They have also budgeted 1 million Danish
Kroners to create a WordPerfect filter for OpenOffice.org to use
with their existing documents.
On October 15, the Nordic Council gave 500,000 Danish Kroners
(65,000 EUR) to The Danish Consumer Agency to create a Nordic site
for consumers about using Open Source software. The Danish Consumer
Agency had earlier showed that they saved hundred of thousands of
Danish Kroners using an Open Source solution for their website
instead of a Unix-based soltuion.
Though currently available only in Danish, the report is being
translated to English–and you have something to look forward to.
This report is the most well-documented Open Source reports so far,
with a great deal of references and tests. The writers are
university people (two associate professors and a professor) and
not a consulting company.