The new IT policy being developed by city of Helsinki's will focus on vendor independence and the use of open source software, expects Johanna Sumuvuori, a Green city council member. "The new strategy will soon be discussed in the council. I want the IT department to keep an open mind and not by default reselect the proprietary applications currently used. Every year the city of Helsinki spends a lot of money on proprietary licences and we should be reducing these costs."
The comments by Sumuvuori follow a rumpus between advocates of free and open source software and an IT news site sponsored by a proprietary software maker, over an ongoing test with OpenOffice, a suite of open source office tools.
The outcome of this pilot is important, says Sumuvuori, who has been pushing the city's IT department to consider using vendor independent software since early 2010.
Prodded by the council, the IT department started studying the possibilities and early this year began testing OpenOffice. It installed OpenOffice on all of the city's 22,500 workstations, alongside a proprietary office suite. It also asked some six hundred of the in total 38,000 city employees to, for one year, use only OpenOffice for creating and managing documents.
Messages posted on social network Twitter by civil servants participating in this OpenOffice pilot, resulted in two contrasting reports.
The Free Software Foundation Europe this Tuesday posted an article explaining that 75 percent of the participants in the pilot are 'satisfied' with this suite of open source office productivity tools.
The opposite conclusion was reported in an article by MS Areena, on 9 December. It wrote that the OpenOffice pilot was failing, a conclusion it based on an explanation by one of the city's administrative secretary's that 150 of the 600 users had requested to return to using the proprietary software.
No survey
The city of Helsinki has not officially asked those involved in the pilot about their experiences with the vendor independent office suite. The director from the IT division at the city's Economic and Planning Centre, Markku Raitio: "We haven't performed any survey of such kind. I cannot confirm these reports. The city of Helsinki will communicate about the outcomes of its open office pilot when we are ready."
Some of the tweets that led to the brawl, were posted by Mirva Haltia-Holmberg, a Helsinki City Transport board member and a participant in the OpenOffice pilot.
"The city of Helsinki enthusiastically promoting the use of open source programs in the city administration", Haltia-Holmberg commented by email.
She explains that recently the IT department sent an inquiry to all six hundred OpenOffice users. "A 150 felt they needed the proprietary office installed to be able to do their office tasks properly. The rest continues with OpenOffice."
According to Haltia-Holmberg most of the problems were caused by opening documents in proprietary formats. "Opening those is not smooth, and these tools are used by civil servants from all ages and skill levels."
More information:
Report by FSFE
MS Areena news item (in Finnish)
Earlier news item