The Dutch city of Heerenveen is migrating to OpenOffice.org for its 350-computer infrastructure, and will save 135,000 euros as a result. One day of training was sufficient to ready their workers for the change.

Chennai Corporation of India is migrating 220 computers to OOo. “Senior officials said the move was made after a proprietary software representative approached the civic headquarters to notify them about the license fee for using their software.” As we are seeing, cost-conscious markets are among the first to break through with desktop FOSS adoption. What makes me confident, though, is that everyone is cost conscious when pressed enough. And after many competitors have made this cost savings move, the rest will be forced to do so in order to compete.

Yahoo News picks up on the recent reports of Firefox’s marketshare growth with Firefox Nipping at IE’s Heels in Europe: “Mendel suggested that some European users might be avoiding Microsoft’s products due to its ongoing conflict with the European Union over antitrust issues. “I think the other really interesting development here in Europe is that the younger people have always used Linux and other forms of open-source software,” Mendel explained. “And in the universities across Europe, students are strongly encouraged to use open-source tools.”

When universities teach open source, we can expect years or decades of positive returns on the effort invested. Desktop FOSS growth in Europe is therefore poised for explosive growth!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 7:46 am and is filed under Open Source, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.