101 lines
3.9 KiB
HTML
101 lines
3.9 KiB
HTML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
|
|
|
|
<html newsdate="2011-12-13">
|
|
<version>1</version>
|
|
|
|
<head>
|
|
<title>Helsinki city officials highly satisfied with Free Software</title>
|
|
</head>
|
|
<body>
|
|
|
|
<h1>Helsinki city officials highly satisfied with Free Software</h1>
|
|
|
|
<p>City officials in Helsinki, Finland, are overwhelmingly
|
|
satisfied after trying
|
|
out the Free Software office suite OpenOffice.org on their laptops. 75% of 600
|
|
officials have been using OpenOffice.org exclusively since February, as part of
|
|
a pilot project where the city installed the program on 22,500 workstations.</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>
|
|
In the spring of 2011, the city installed the Free Software office suite
|
|
OpenOffice on 22,500 desktops. On the laptops of 600 officials, it was
|
|
deployed as the only office suite. Even though these latter users only received
|
|
a written manual and no actual training, still 75 % of the users where
|
|
satisfied. The pilot project is based on an initiative by Helsinki city council
|
|
member Johanna Sumuvuori.
|
|
</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>
|
|
"This feedback is very encouraging. We congratulate the City of
|
|
Helsinki on its successful pilot project, and hope others will follow,"
|
|
comments Otto Kekäläinen, the Free Software
|
|
Foundation Europe's coordinator for Finland. "Free Software means
|
|
that public bodies no longer depend on a single vendor, and don't have
|
|
to pay monopoly prices for their software and services anymore. This
|
|
is a crucial difference in these economically straightened times."
|
|
</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>
|
|
The key reason why some users were not satisfied were difficulties in opening
|
|
files generated with the proprietary Microsoft Office. Yet according to a
|
|
Twitter messages from Helsinki city transport board member Mirva
|
|
Haltia-Holmberg, most of these interoperability issues would be solved if all
|
|
users learned to save their files in the correct format.
|
|
</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>
|
|
Helsinki is far from the only city in Finland to make use of Free Software. In
|
|
a similar initiative in Turku city council, Green Party chairman Ville Niinistö
|
|
stated: "Migration into free and open source software and operating systems
|
|
would save significant amounts of money on the city level. In office software
|
|
the move into open souce could be implemented very quickly. Migration into open
|
|
source software would also be good for the general development of an
|
|
information society, since this type of software makes possible faster and more
|
|
free software development."
|
|
</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>
|
|
During year 2011 a number of projects have been started to increase of use of
|
|
Free Software in the public administration in Finland. Besides Helsinki,
|
|
similar initiatives have been undertaken in the city councils of Tampere,
|
|
Turku, Paimio and Salo, usually started by the council members. In the spring
|
|
of 2011 71 % of members of parliament responded "yes" to the claim that the
|
|
state should prefer Free Software (such as GNU/Linux and OpenOffice
|
|
<a href="http://www.valo-cd.fi/tutkimukset/pr-finland-2011-04-15-parliament -
|
|
candidates-for-foss-(finnish).pdf">in its ICT acquisitions</a>).
|
|
|
|
</p>
|
|
|
|
<p>
|
|
Finland has been a forerunner in the use of Free Software in the private sector
|
|
for years. <a
|
|
href="http://www.redhat.com/about/where-is-open-source/activity/">Research
|
|
published two years ago</a> by Red Hat and Georgia Tech placed
|
|
the Finnish industry first in the world in use of Free Software.
|
|
The Finnish Ministry of Defence has been using GNU/Linux in key system since
|
|
2006. The most important argument for the use of GNU/Linux was security. The
|
|
Finnish Ministry of Justice has migrated into OpenOffice in 2007. Schools
|
|
around Finland have been saving significant amounts of money by moving to the
|
|
Linux Terminal Server Project.
|
|
</p>
|
|
<p>
|
|
|
|
<i> <a name="freesoftware">Find out why at FSFE, <a href="/activities/whyfs/whyfs.html">we speak
|
|
about Free Software</a> rather than "open
|
|
source"</a></i>
|
|
|
|
</p>
|
|
|
|
</body>
|
|
<tags>
|
|
<tag key="front-page"/>
|
|
<tag key="fi"/>
|
|
<tag key="procurement"/>
|
|
</tags>
|
|
</html>
|
|
<!--
|
|
Local Variables: ***
|
|
mode: xml ***
|
|
End: ***
|
|
-->
|