 Member of the British Parliament criticizes his country for having fear to use open source. Meanwhile, Brazil already goes forward and saves millions.
 Open Source is used to name programs that are done without intellectual property rights. Dozens, hundred or even thousands of people worldwide gather to create of improve a software application.
Speaking at the opening ceremony for the Open Centre in England, John Pugh MP criticized his government for not using more open source programs. In his speech he said that "there is a widespread ignorance" in the British public sector who has fear of using these programs. Those against open source (read Microsoft) has strong presence in governments of several countries to show the 'advantages' of their programs. It is known that programs like Photoshop has more resources then GIMP, MS Office also has more functions then Open Office. However, the vast majority of us do not use all the resources that these programs offer and we could as easily change to other open source programs. The main advantage is cost, zero! Considering government institutions, we should really hold pressure to use open source programs. At least so I think. Contrary to spending millions in copyrighted programs, I believe it would be best if this money went to education, health or other welfare areas. When making the speech, John Pugh was also realistic when saying that open source programs have their risk. Some of these programs still have coding errors if installed on a large scale. Moreover, there is sometimes a lack of support that companies such as Microsoft would be able to provide. However, even so, with as much money saved the government could hire a team of advanced programmers to solve any problem in their systems. The Brazilian government already has opensource programs in large scale usage. Several of the federal government's websites are created on Joomla (same platform that we use). The government also invests in the coding of a national Linux platform and supports the usage of BrOffice in their computers. What does that mean for Brazilians? The largest bank in the country (public institution), Banco do Brasil recently informed that BR$20 millions (a little under US$10 million) was saved by using open source programs. Money is being saved, not we just have to see where the 'new' money is going to...
Lets tell our government leaders to change to open source. Let them know that you would rather have your money spent on welfare and not Bill Gates well being. Talk to your representatives and ask this because it is your money being spent.
Want to try out a few open source programs? Check them out at our Downloads area, we have only have the best of open source and freeware.
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