Open Source Weblog

As Janine writes:

“David Gauke MP, Shadow Minister for the UK Treasury, pointed out… that just 6% of the Treasury’s servers are based on open source. Figures from some other departments were even less healthy or toonebulous to quantify at all.

Cox points out the stark difference with the attitude in the UK. ‘The US government is not risk averse and looks at projects in a very commercial way,’ he added.”

Interestingly, Alfresco’s president and CEO John Powell pointed to the UK’s close relationship to the US as one of the reasons why the UK lags behind Europe in open source adoption.

“Powell blamed the failure of UK companies to embrace open source partly on a reluctance to challenge the entrenched software licensing models that sprung up in the 1980s.

Language barriers meant US firms selling into continental Europe needed local partners to do business, ensuring those customers a certain independence from the US way of doing things. UK customers, however, lapped up the proprietary message directly from the sales staff and they are still lapping up that message today,” writes Janine.

All is not lost, however, as small firms’ desire for cheaper, easier to use web applications is propelling open source toward the mainstream, according to Red Hat fellow Alan Cox.

“From small businesses, increasingly the answer I get is: 'I don’t care about open source and proprietary, I care about the person I hired to make it work'. We’re seeing more and more web-based models, because companies just want to get the job done and pay less for it,” said Cox.