Governments: Starting to Vote For Ubuntu Linux?

Governments continue to march toward open source. The Dutch government last year committed to use open standards, the French government has deployed Kubuntu desktops to over 1,000 members of parliament and staff, and a few days ago the United Kingdom government announced an Open Source action plan. The plan, entitled ‘Open Source, Open Standards and Re-Use‘, calls to ensure that open source solutions be fully and fairly considered for public sector IT projects and emphasises the requirement for sharing and re-use of code to reduce costs and drive common solutions.

Finally governments are realising that open source has benefits beyond initial cost savings. They are discovering the freedom to share and re-use open source solutions is more cost-efficient in the long run. To quote Richard Stallman (founder of the GNU project and Free Software Foundation), FOSS essentially means “free as in free speech, not as in free beer.”

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