More about Open Source Software.

Well, here’s a bit of goodish news.   It seems the the UK government has decided to give open source software a bit more backing.   In an announcement, today, Tom Watson MP – the Minister for Digital Engagement – has said that open source software will be on an equal footing with propriety software, which is all to the good.   You can read more, in the BBC’s report, here.

For those of us on a budget, I’d  recommend reading the O’Reilly report about Bristol City Council shift to StarOffice, here, or download Bristol City Council’s own reports, here.

If I’ve understood the report correctly, Bristol City saved itself a million pounds worth of taxpayers money by not updating to the latest version of Microsoft Office.   That was just the licences; — it also means, if I’ve understood thing’s correctly, that, because pieces of software like OpenOffice.org*, Firefox, and GIMP are written to work on as many different ages of computer as possible, it meant they saved a fortune in terms of hardware.

By not having to update too much.

They’re written to work on computers of a range of different ages, so, in other words …

Which, for those of us on a budget, is a good thing.   It means — much like Bristol City Council — we can save a little more cash, before having to update our machines

* Speaking personally, I’ve experimented with the Mac version of OpenOffice.orgº.   Whilst I’ve found it to use a lot more of the Apple keyboard shortcuts, NeoOffice seems to deal much more efficiently with the various fonts I’ve installed over the years.   Hopefully, that shortcuts issue will be something they’ll address in the upcoming release of NeoOffice 3.0, at the end of March.

º OpenOffice can use alt (⌥) plus the cursor keys to manoeuvre around a given piece of text, one word or line at a time, much like any other piece of Apple approved software, but seemingly not access the installed fonts.   With NeoOffice, it’s the other way round.   Given that NeoOffice has been the open source suite of Mac User choice for some time, that’s bad form on Planamesa’s part..