Government is one of the major ICT and software consumers worldwide. Governments typically need to implement large solutions, it is very unusual that will go out of business, and once they choose a supplier, it is unlikely that they will change rapidly..
Government technical departments are by nature risk averse, they are facing two major issues around ICT: growing costs and advocating solutions that are good for the country but not necessarily for vendors.
Open Source Software has been presented as a solution for
Already more than ten years old, Second Life has been the leader of establishing Virtual Worlds. Membership is free, but the Second Life Grid is written on proprietary software from Linden Labs.
From the LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation website: “LiMo Foundation is an industry consortium dedicated to creating the first truly open, hardware-independent, Linux-based operating system for mobile devices. . The members of the Foundation are major global players in the telecommunications industry: operators, vendors, chip manufacturers, i.e. NEC, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, Verizon, Telefonica, Wind River, AMD, ARM, Huawei, Motorola, Ericsson and many more.
Mobile computing is more than a trend: it is a reality that most of us are unaware of because it is inside the multiple devices that we use daily . There has been a rapid and growing adoption of OSS for mobile platforms.
An article from CNET News comments that by April 2009 Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) will start to offer technology “to help enterprise customers build their own cloud-computing setups. But unlike most of the better-known players in this nascent market, the twist here is that the technology will be supplied by an open-source shop”.
Article from Wired magazine that tells the very recent story of commercial netbooks, from Asustek It gives a comparative analysis of how OSS fits in the market battle for the segment. Part of the article focuses on how OSS can change the model in the Education industry: .
“Netbooks”, which with a combination of low cost cellphone type chips, Cloud Computing and Open Source Software, are changing the PC industry. According to the New York Times (April 2009) Microsoft posted for the first time in their history a decline sales of the PC version of Windows. The article and others explain why netbooks are the disruption that is coming “from the bottom and forever change the market”.
“To compete against OSS, Microsoft must target a process, not a company”.
This quote is from “The Halloween Documents” which were written internally in Microsoft as early as 1998 and generated a discussion with the author of the Cathedral and the Bazaar. At the beginning it was like a war between Good and Evil with both parties assuming the “Good side”.
