The open source countdown has begun

'By freeing themselves from the shackles of proprietary IT systems, companies can gain a further competitive edge'

On Wednesday, Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude, outlined his plans to start shifting away from using proprietary Microsoft productivity applications in order to adopt more open source technologies.

A move that could potentially save the public sector millions of pounds annually, it would also see him, and government, break away from what he refers to as the vendor oligopoly currently dominating IT.

Since 2010, over 200 million has been spent by the government on Microsoft Office alone. This is a startling figure when one considers that there are open source software packages capable of delivering almost exactly the same functionality for little to no cost.

In a time of austerity, when we have all been asked to shoulder some of the burden, it then almost seems absurd that the government would incur such an expense when a viable alternative would be available for practically zero cost.

The arguments for Microsoft Office and against the open source alternatives, LibreOffice and OpenOffice, are well versed. Microsoft Office is, after all, a very slick piece of software, with a huge range of features.

But, the truth of the matter is that only a very small fraction of users utilise more than the most basic of these features. The advanced features are the reserve of a handful of power users, who need them for a very specific set of applications many of which are now also offered by the open source packages.

In the past, it has been argued that LibreOffice and OpenOffice are buggy and that they did not offer a comparable user experience to its Microsoft Office competitor. Today, that is not the case. The open source options available in the market today can meet user needs just as well as proprietary software if not better.

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The open source countdown has begun