Share and reuse interoperability solutions for public administrations

The eighth edition of Valo-CD, a CD mad in Finland full of free and open source applications, is available for download since last week. The CD, which is preconfigured to run on proprietary operating systems, is meant to help promote open source software.

The CD is produced in a joint venture of the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions (Coss), the Finish free software association Vapaa Suomi, a publishing firm, Suomi Media, and Seravo, an open source IT service provider.

That there is a need to promote free and open source is confirmed by a survey done Tampere University of Technology in the spring of 2011, the group explains in the statement to announce the CD. "The university concluded that one-third of the population has not yet heard of open source."

Matti Saastamoinen, one of the specialists at Coss, says that the availability in Finnish of all the applications on the CD is a big help for the centre's promotion activities. "Habits change slowly and making people aware that there are free and open source alternatives to proprietary software is very time-consuming. It is great to have projects like Valo-CD."

The CD includes applications such as office application suite LibreOffice, web browser Firefox, email client Thunderbird, media player VLC and instant messaging client Pidgin.

Manuals included
Also available on the CD are several guides in Finnish, written by the Ministry of Justice, the country's National Board of Education and FLOSS Manuals, a volunteer group working on making available free and open source manuals.

The makers of the CD argue that the CD will make it easier for computer users to move to PCs based entirely on open source. The applications provided by the CD are also very common on PCs that run Linux.

The CD was originally made available only in Finnish. The first English edition of the Valo-CD was published last September.

More information:
Valo-CD
New Valo-CD announcement (in Finnish)