by Andrea Di Maio | May 21, 2009 | 2 Comments
Earlier today I had an interesting conversation with a vendor that supports an open source product in the area of application infrastructure. They started from Australia, where their product was deployed several years ago across multiple agencies, and have since moved to Europe. We were discussing whether emerging government policies around open source, such as [...]
Category: open source in government Tags: open source, stimulus package, UK government, US
by Andrea Di Maio | April 9, 2009 | Comments Off
My post and my Facebook conversations yesterday have generated a number of interesting reactions. My hypothesis was that focusing on open source at the lower levels of the stack or for software products that are or will soon be commodities is not helping governments fight the right battle. One comment said that cost is a [...]
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Category: open source in government Tags: cost cutting, open standards
by Andrea Di Maio | April 8, 2009 | 5 Comments
Did I get your attention? I was sure I would. Of course I do believe that both open standards and open source do play an important role in government (and I won’t get into explaining the differences – after six years that people discuss about this I’m confident we all have a fair idea). Academics, researchers, [...]
Category: cloud open source in government Tags: commoditization, open standards
by Andrea Di Maio | March 27, 2009 | 1 Comment
This afternoon I gave a short presentation about open source in the public sector to a group of CIOs from European cities. I told them how I’ve gradually seen the emotional and “religious” arguments behind open source being replaced by more rational cost and vendor independence considerations, and I pointed to the recent UK open [...]
Category: cloud open source in government Uncategorized Tags: cost cutting, local government
by Andrea Di Maio | November 26, 2008 | Comments Off
Earlier today an article about the role of open source software in difficult economic times made me reflect about whether government organizations will become more or less interested in open source with the budget cuts and cost saving targets many of them are being or will soon be faced with. I know, this is a [...]
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Category: open source in government Tags: open source, recession
by Andrea Di Maio | September 23, 2008 | Comments Off
I am in a different European country today and I had two more meetings about open source. Like yesterday, the conversation was about how open source software can help government organizations better deal with their outsourcers and system integrators. I met two large agencies respectively in the area of social security and health insurance, and [...]
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Category: open source in government Tags: open source
by Andrea Di Maio | September 22, 2008 | 2 Comments
Today was one of those days when you tell something that surprises a client in one meeting and gets confirmed by another client in the next meeting. I was discussing with some people who are in charge for the open standard and open source policy in a particular country, telling them that IMHO they had [...]
Category: open source in government Tags: open source
