Freiburg, Germany, Adopts OpenOffice
Now that the avalanche is picking up speed, it’s interesting to observe the manner in which different countries’ governments migrate toward open source software. (At least, from the articles I read in the press. Certainly there must be many exceptions and smaller implementations that don’t make it to the international headlines.)
In France, a strongly-centralized government is adopting OpenOffice.org and other FOSS programs in its central government agencies (well over 300,000 systems have been migrated to OpenOffice already, for example).
On the other hand, a much more federalist country, Germany, is moving city-by-city and state-by-state. In this we have some news for today: Erwin Tenhumberg announces that Freiburg, Germany, will upgrade 2,000 municipal computers to OpenOffice.org, and save €500,000 over the next two years compared to what moving to MSO 2007 would cost. (He also provides a link to the original article in German.)
The USA is also moving in a federalist manner. Four states have so far made commitments or begun legal proceedings to migrate to ODF (though not explicitly to OpenOffice yet): Massachusetts, Minnesota, Texas, and California, in that chronological order.