Switzerland’s public administrations are increasingly turning to using open source, according to the country’s IT trade group SwissICT and the open source advocacy group /ch/open. Like in 2012, the two groups have surveyed public administrations and companies in the country. They notice a “high increase in the use of open source software.”
“The results confirm the 2012 findings, open source software is now used in virtually all major government agencies and companies”, the two write.
The main reasons to switch to open source include the use of open standards, knowledge sharing with developer communities, cost savings and independence from IT vendors.
SwissICT and /ch/open do not provide further details on the use of open source in Swiss public administration. Their ‘Open Source Study Switzerland 2015’ will be presented on 3 June at a conference in Zurich.
In their announcement, the two organisations report a significant growth in the use of open source in almost all ICT areas. They note a 23 per cent increase in the use of open source webservers, and a 36 per cent rise in the number of Linux servers. They note rapid growth in the use of open source in the areas of IT security (by 36 percent) and cloud computing (42 per cent). “The use of open source in business-critical areas is significantly increasing”, they write.
The results are based on a survey among 200 members of SwissICT and participants of the Schweizerischen Informatikkonferenz SIK 2015. The study was done by the University of Bern and funded by the federal government, the Canton of Bern, educa.ch and open source service providers.
More information:
ch/open press announcement (in German)
ch/open press announcement (in French)
Netzwoche news item (in German)
IT Magazine news item (in German)
Inside IT news item (in German)
Computerworld news item (in German)