Peter Marklund's Home

Recently I have noticed just how hot a topic Open Source software has become among decision makers in government and industry. Many people are still hesitant about it but want to know more. Others are beyond merely having accepted Open Source as an alternative - they are considering adopting it as a part of the IT policy of their organizations. Open Source software has completed an incredible transition from being something obscure and experimental that computer geeks and academics were playing with to becoming a competitive advantage for mainstream software companies.

Danska Teknologirådet has conducted a thorough investigation that concludes that open source software offers a huge (in the order of magnitude of billions of DEK) cost saving opportunity for the danish state.

Svenska statskontoret (the Swedish Agency of Public Management) has started an investigation into how Open Source software can be used by the agency and whether Open Source shall become a precondition for its central software purchasing (ramavtal).

David Wheeler at Red Hat has put together an impressive article with statistics showing the significant market share of open source software such as Apache and Linux. The article has statistics indicating that open source software is more reliable (measured in uptime) than commercial alternatives such as IIS and Windows. David Wheeler goes on to list investigations that suggest how Open Source software is very competitive by common criteria such as performance, scalability, security, and cost.