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…”
Open Source Tour of Europe: Switzerland
“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…”