Cabinet Office to switch to open source
For the past 15 years or so every year has been the 'year of open source'. Chief demon has been Microsoft. So today's news story in The Guardian must have been music in the ears for open source advocates. We have been here before. Some years ago the state government of Bavaria in Germany was widely reported as 'ditching' Microsoft. Clearly with the UK Government committed to savings in all Government departments it must be a no-brainer for Ministers to cut the software expenditure. The article tends to only be talking about Office rather than open source in general. There seems to be no mention of ditching Windows for Linux. If the Government was prepared to standardise of OpenOffice then that would be big win. it could also consider the 'cloud' and be enticed to Google Docs. There would be a training implication but Google has been winning business. Open source advocates would like to pretend that Google is this little upstart business and Microsoft is the