The Norwegian government wants the country's public administrations to make more use of open source applications in order to reduce the dependency on proprietary software, the news agency AP reports.
AP on Monday quoted Minister of Government Administration and Reform Heidi Grande Roeys, who said she would grant two million kroner (225,000 euro) to the Nasjonalt Kompetansesenter for fri programvare, the national open source resource centre, to help achieve that goal.
One of the centre's first projects will be to make it easier for public administrations to switch to OpenOffice, an open source suite of office applications. Many public administrations are tied to Microsoft Office because they run back-end applications that are tied to this proprietary software. "The problem is that these specialised applications and OpenOffice do not always work well together. This grant should solve that."
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