The State of the Nation: Open Source in the UK

I often encourage people to use more ethical Free and Open Source Software (FOSS, of FLOSS - including Libre) , and they ask me for more information.

I usually direct people to the OpenOffice.org website, and especially to the newsletter there (on Blogger). Most people mainly use computers for familiar office functions, and OpenOffice.org is a free community-developed alternative that offers many advantages to expensive proprietary solutions. The newsletter keeps track of developments and particularly of big migration successes.

There's also the Mozilla corporation, developers of Firefox (web browser) and Thunderbird (email client), and news sites like Slashdot ('news for nerds, stuff that matters' - you have been warned).

In fact from Slashdot I found this link from the Computer Business Review Online, The State of the Nation: Open Source in the UK. It may be dry reading for the uninitiated, but I think it is an interesting and quite accurate investigation of some important developments. Returning readers may have picked up my commitment to FOSS and know that this blog is produced entirely on FOSS. Despite the fact that Linux has just celebrated it's fifteen birthday however (today - happy birthday!) people are not very familiar with using it on home or office computers.

There is a good feeling of the beginnings of a big change though. Over all these years of steadily developing FOSS, including the operating systems that make it all work (like Linux), it seems the big private players have been merely tweaking and adding minor aesthetic enhancements to their sofware (and then of course charging a fortune for upgrades). It hasn't been all that difficult for the FOSS developers to catch up then (this isn't true in the games arena). Now more and more organisations and individuals are realising that the transition to FOSS isn't all that big a leap. This article explores the current state of use of FOSS, and the voluntary sector should take note.