Erwin Tenhumberg on Open Source in the EU
Erwin Tenhumberg posted two interesting articles recently:
The first article links to a PDF of an EU study on the impact of open source. Erwin chose to highlight a few points of particular interest, which I’ll quote here:
- According to table 1 on page 31 more than 90% of the surveyed Brazilian government organization and more than 70% of the Indian government organizations are using OpenOffice.org.
- According to paragraph 6.2.3.8 on page 35 a market share of 8% in German businesses is estimated for OpenOffice.org.
- Quote from page 102: “Indeed, the group of users was also asked whether as a result of the experimentation they thought they could do with OpenOffice the same amount of work they could do with Microsoft Office. As shown in Figure 46, under 10% of respondents thought they could not, more than 20% thought they definitely could perform as well with OpenOffice, while almost 60% thought they could be as productive with OpenOffice (as confirmed by the time-use analysis) though with some problems. Given their previous lack of experience with OpenOffice the fact that problems were subjectively perceived is unsurprising, but the fact that objectively the productivity of users remained the same and did not reduce is important.”
- An interesting read is also table 45, “Conclusions from the comparison of the usage of OOo and MSO in the organizations”, on page 244.
Erwin’s second article covers the large migration of French government agencies to OpenOffice.org. The original is in French, but Erwin summarizes:
“According to this French article the French Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing saved 1.2M Euros with OpenOffice.org. The switch to OpenOffice.org cost them 1.5M Euros, but the renewal of Microsoft Office licenses would have cost them 2.7M Euros.”
In summary, the early reports from the EU and its member states show how strong the case is for moving to open source and OpenOffice.org. Further, every successful migration makes succeeding ones easier, in a snowball effect. This is the behavior expected by Tipping Point theory, and we should expect to see the pace of migrations continue to increase both in Europe and around the world.