There seems to have been a reassuring amount of mainstream news coverage of open source recently. Hopefully this is a trend that can continue.
The first I noticed was a segment on Radio 4’s “In Business” called New Wave Computing which was a very basic introduction to the ideas behind open source and free software. Not terribly interesting for someone who already understands this area, but Radio 4 does get a wide listenership.
Next was a European Commission report extolling the virtues of open source and free software, as reported by the BBC. The summary of the executive summary is that open source will incur a small up-front cost as a result of migration and retraining, but long-term cost saving can be extreme. And that’s just the financial savings. Managing to avoid vendor lock-in (typically Microsoft) has no easily-defined direct costs, but the freedoms gained by avoiding it are considerable. The full report is 287 pages long, so don’t read it all unless you’re really keen. Pages 283 and 284 contain the final summary and conclusions, if you want the quick version. The BBC report also notes the Early Day Motion about software in schools has been signed by more than 100 MPs: this is the one I’m hoping my MP will also sign. No reply to my letter of last week, yet.
On a related note, at least relating to technical ‘freedom’, Number 10 have responded to an online petition which asked for an explicit exemption in UK law to allow “individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format”. Reading between the lines of the reply, there seems to be the will be actually make this happen. Whether it’s as a direct result of this petition, of course, is open to debate; probably not, but it’s good to get something positive from Number 10.