Public administrations need not fear switching to open source, says Matthias Günter, until last month CIO of the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property. "Wherever we use it, after the usual careful selection that we apply to any software implementation, it proves its worth."
The IP Institute uses many different open source solutions. Use cases range from tools to manage file compression (7Zip), web site content management (Typo3), operating systems for database servers (Linux) to a complete system for handling official requests for its procedures (eKomm). "And we're using tons of open source tools for our software development."
Günter headed the IT department of the IP Institute for more than a decade. He was one of the speakers at a conference on public procurement of IT in Bern, which took place on 11 September.
According to Günter one of the next step in the open source environment may be open source cloud computing stacks. One of the things he would have liked to do that didn't materialize was the usage of the open source telephony solution Asterisk. No bidder was even offering it in the public tender.
Document formats
One area of concern is that of document formats. "Current formats are for too complex. The makers never thought about long-term storage, or long-term reproducibility" The former CIO is interested in combining XML and CSS to build document archives.
Günter said that some public administrations seem to have psychological barriers to open source. These are needles fears, he said. "In fact, I foresee a future where some public administrations could be important, functioning almost as open source software houses." He expects this to be the case especially in areas where, because of new legislation, citizens and users need software. "Here open source might be the macro economically optimal solution."
More information:
Presentation (pdf, in German)
IT procurement conference site
Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property
eKom at the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property