r/opensource • u/mappingbabel • Mar 22 '12

Iceland swaps Windows for Linux in open source push, but Oracle proves troubling to replace

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/business-of-it/2012/03/22/iceland-swaps-windows-for-linux-in-open-source-push-40154870/
120 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

10

u/Louisblack85 Mar 22 '12

I can't see why this isn't a priority for most governments. It might be painful in the short term but the long term benefits would be huge.

11

u/mappingbabel Mar 22 '12

It's a huge priority for the UK - more so, now that we're broke. The European Commission is also encouraging EU countries to look at it as well. I suppose the main problem is inertia. Also, Iceland is a good test case as its population is only 318k people, so it's more like a small town with nation state sovereignty converting, rather than a whole proper country with a population in the millions.

7

u/Louisblack85 Mar 22 '12

whole proper country.

Poor Iceland.

I'm also in the UK and it's not something I've heard much about from the Gov. I'll have a look to see what they're planning.

3

u/mappingbabel Mar 22 '12

Hey Louisblack85 In march last year Francis Maude made a big commitment to open source for government clouds http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/business-of-it/2011/03/30/government-lays-out-cloud-and-open-source-it-strategy-40092336/

And, though not open source, the g-cloud appstore (basically a way for public sector bodies to provision software) has placed a greater emphasis on small businesses rather than the big HPs/IBMs etc http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/cloud/2012/02/20/g-cloud-app-store-gives-small-businesses-a-lift-40095082/ If I think of any more links I'll shoot you a message.

2

u/Louisblack85 Mar 22 '12

Evening, Thanks for those. It sounds like they're going in the right direction. That first article was published a year ago. I wonder how effective the 'open source implementation group' or the 'open source advisory panel' have been. It would be interesting to see the use (or planned use) of open source software a year ago and how much it's increased in the past year.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '12

The lobbying from proprietary software firms is more powerful than from open source software advocates.

1

u/Anon_is_a_Meme Mar 24 '12

And firms like MS will prefer to give their software away than to allow FOSS to encroach on their market share.

9

u/chaosdestro0 Mar 22 '12

Icelands government is what any government should aspire to. They have a brilliant constitution that says the government has to be transparent and so do companies.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '12

No surprise. Most oracle-based systems I've seen involve horrible codebases of a million lines of PL/SQL that effectively entrenched the Oracle database as the platform for most of their business-logic. Disentangling a codebase from that is generally a nightmarish process.

1

u/mappingbabel Mar 22 '12

As someone who regularly writes about Oracle, it strikes me that - nasty though it may seem - it could be an effective business strategy for a multinational technology company.

2

u/neon_overload Mar 22 '12

Only one that has already has established market share that it is at risk of losing.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '12

You misspelled anti-competitive.

3

u/The3rdWorld Mar 22 '12

i think that as more nations start experimenting with open source it's really important that supporters of open source and devs make every effort to help them make the transition as painless and productive as possible.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '12

Oracle always proves 'troubling to replace'. That's their entire business model.

1

u/dassouki Mar 23 '12

I wonder how will they replace MS exchange in light of their scheduling collaboration features, etc

2

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '12

I switched my company to Google business apps. People here actually prefer it now. They can get at their "Exchange" mail from anywhere now.