World Map Shows Countries Requiring Open Source Software

"Europe and South America are the biggest hotspots for open-source use in government," reports Network World, while Bulgaria requires all software written for the government to be FOSS. Slashdot reader alphadogg quotes their report: It's become increasingly common over the past decade or so to see laws being passed to either mandate the use of open-source software or, at the very least, encourage people in government who make procurement decisions to do so. Here's a map of the status of open-source laws around the world.

It Makes Sense

[negRo_slim]

It makes sense but it doesn't make money. So don't expect to see mandated or even encouraged FOSS here in the United States on any kind of meaningful level.

Why sell support or service when you can sell that AND the software.

Red Hat makes billions, grew 100% 5 years

[raymorris]

Red Hat has grown almost 100% over the last five years and has billions in revenue. The counter-argument would be Microsoft, but you may have noticed Microsoft has been open-sourcing stuff too, and making billions.

At the same time, open source saved my last employer, a government agency, a ton of money. In many cases, it just works better all around to share. The company selling the software and services doesn't have the cost of developing everything from scratch, and customers aren't dependent on a single vendor.

Re:

[SpaghettiPattern]

The map is about use in governments. At any rate FOSS cannot be used as a ransom tool for corporations. The issue on whether "it makes money" is moot. But if you want to bring up money, in the long term the US admin would most likely save taxpayers money by switching to FOSS. And US corporations will be forced to fend for themselves even more, without a wealthy uncle to sponsor their businesses.

Re:

[rtb61]

NSA, they played and now US corporations must pay. Basically the big driver is security and closed source proprietary code with NSA and FBI back doors, even just the hint of them will all be kicked out because everyone knows the US government would blackmail countries by threatening to shut down power stations, traffic systems, delete medical records, shut down airports, basically everyone kind of criminal act imaginable with total control back doors. Not the distrust is aimed at the US alone, no one can t

Re:

[Bert64]

The government does not make money from software, software costs them money.
The only reason for the government not to favor open source would be external commercial influences.

Re:

[jellomizer]

The biggest problem with the US isn't capitalism but a culture of pointing their finger at someone else.
They buy software and pay for an army of consultants even if their staff is just as good if not better. Not because they are expecting something better, but someone to point their finger when something goes wrong.
You get a FOSS software package. It has a flaw, there will be fingers pointing in all directions who chose the software, who reviewed it, did anyone check the source, if we are to fix it, how a

Open Source Freedom?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmmm. Is requiring open source freedom?

Re:

[r1348]

It's mandated only in the public sector fo ra question of security (nobody likes NSA backdoors).
The private sector is free to act as they wish.

It's the opposite!

[Anonymous Coward]

Those countries don't need free software anymore as they already adopted it an a wide base.

It's all those other poor countries that still rely on proprietary crap that really need more free software!

Re:

[unixisc]

Everybody needs it. As far as governments go, they need it so that regardless of who they hire to do their IT work, they'd have the sources to go to in the event of a major migration of either hardware or software. Say Kim Jong Un fell in love w/ the Itanium and wants to run the Nork regime on that. He'd need FOSS to compile and run on it, and along w/ it, the last FreeBSD or Linux that ran on that. Once he does that, he can buy all rights to the platform from Intel & HP, and have a nationalized CPU

Re:CR/LF

[slashrio]

My guess is that he put the necessary CR/LFs in his text, but that this giiky Slashdot didn't show them.

Re:

[Kjella]

[wall of text]

You know, your argument would come across better if you could divide it into paragraphs. I think where most of it starts and ends is that despite totally dominating other sectors like cell phones and supercomputers, Linux has not been able to conquer the basic corporate desktop. Even if what you do today is just mail and office, chances are better that you're running Windows/Outlook/MS Office than anything else. I've heard for almost 20 years that MS Office was pretty much "done" around Office 97 but none t

Re:

[Bert64]

It's hard to compete against an incumbent, even when you offer a massively superior product and have a huge marketing budget to promote it.
In markets where there was no incumbent influence, linux has generally beaten microsoft hands down.

Linux will never conquer the corporate desktop as it currently exists, but what is far more likely to happen is that the desktop becomes a small niche for specific use cases while the mass market moves on to web based applications that can be accessed from any device. For t

Re:

[morane]

That's indeed a bad map :

• "No data" and "no law" shouldn't be in the same category
• The map key is badly ordered

US: 20% policy

[Xtifr]

A new policy (a pilot program) in the US is that federal agencies must (with some important exceptions) release at least 20% [cio.gov] of any in-house code they develop as open source.

On hearing this, my brother quickly whipped up a script to print every fifth letter in a text file. :)