1 / 13

An Experience of Transition to Open Source Software in Local Authorities

Paolo Zuliani Free University of Bolzano-Bozen Italy paolo.zuliani@unibz.it. An Experience of Transition to Open Source Software in Local Authorities. What is Open Source?. It's software that you can: Download for free from the Internet:

guri
Download Presentation

An Experience of Transition to Open Source Software in Local Authorities

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Paolo Zuliani Free University of Bolzano-Bozen Italy paolo.zuliani@unibz.it An Experience of Transition to Open Source Software in Local Authorities

  2. What is Open Source? • It's software that you can: • Download for free from the Internet: • You also get the “source code” of the program (i.e. the high-level description) • Use as much as you want and redistribute to others; • Modify at your will (since you have the “source”): • If you redistribute it, then the above rules apply • Ex. GNU General Public License (GPL)

  3. Why is OSS important? • It provides excellent tools for IT infrastructure: • 66% of the world web-servers run Apache (Netcraft survey); • Sendmail, Exim, Postfix, etc. handle email traffic (Internet surveys at about 50%); • Linux is widely used for servers: • How much? We do not know .... there are contrasting numbers (15-30%); • Linux is now established as a feasible option.

  4. How about desktop OSS? • Client operating systems, office automation, personal productivity, etc.; • The FLOSS project interviewed about 1500 EU companies and institutions: • 5% use some desktop OSS; • In the IT world things change quickly, and FLOSS' survey was in early 2002: • Linux for desktop, OpenOffice.org, etc.

  5. The experience • To qualitatively experiment the feasibility of OpenOffice.org for office automation; • Target group: municipalities of the Province of Bolzano-Bozen (northern Italy): • About 500.000 citizens; • 116 municipalities; • About 2000 desktops (Windows-based); • Started in January 2003 by the Consortium of the Municipalities of the Province of Bolzano-Bozen (http://www.gvcc.net).

  6. Methodology • Three steps: • visit the “candidate” site: • Introduction to OpenOffice, workplan establishment; • hw/sw setup: • OpenOffice deployment, document conversion; • personnel training: • Off-site half-day courses; • Support: • One person full-time, plus two on necessity; • Web documentation.

  7. Current status • OpenOffice installed in all the machines (about 2000), alongside the existing software; • Mixed environment: OpenOffice coexists with “traditional” office software; • Actual usage of OpenOffice difficult to assess, however ...

  8. A snapshot Documents modified in one month (August 2004): • .SXW's are produced by OpenOffice; • .DOC's by MS Office (maybe OpenOffice)

  9. Lessons learned • Personnel's resistance to change seems to be the biggest problem; • The “brute force” method (i.e. substituting the existing software environment) is not likely to work; • Document conversion may be a lengthy process (e.g. macro); • Effort, costs and benefits are difficult to analyse...

  10. Follow-up: COSPA project • Consortium for Open Source in the Public Administration: • Introducing, analysing and supporting the use of open source in the Public Administration; • Researching: • Models of TCO/ROI in PAs; • Collection of data on migrations to OSS: • PROM (fine grained process data collection): empirically comparing the usage of proprietary vs OSS; • Cost/benefit analysis.

  11. COSPA project • 15 EU partners: • 5 universities; • 8 PAs; • 2 industries (IBM, Conecta) • 2,6 M€ by FP6 • Jan 04 - Dec 05 http://www.cospa-project.org

  12. Conclusions • OSS seems to qualitatively work well in the small-medium PAs considered; • Introduction of OSS and migration from proprietary/existing sw is not easy: • Training, resistance to change, support, etc.; • Costs and benefits are far from being clear! • We need to better understand the issue: • The COSPA project aims at analysing it.

  13. Thank you! Questions?

More Related