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Open source victories that can make it mainstream...

With examples of the UK government choosing the ODF standard, or Geneva bringing open source software to their schools, are victories that help open source advocates to make the case for wider adoption of open source software and open standards.

In both cases, shows how the benefits are to many to ignore and are quite enough incentive to make the move. The savings on the money that has to be paid in royalties, and for the right to upgrade are considerable. Not only that, at UK case it means that people can access government information without any cost imposed to them just to look said information because they can access it from any suite they choose.

As this article at cnet.com about LibreOffice points out, now people don't have to pay Microsoft for their office suite to be able to access public documents. Whats best, there are several other office suites that can be used to access public documents saved on the ODF format, while being able to handle old Microsoft's formats with ease.

What important about the UK government's decision, is that it frees their documents from a possible lock in to a single vendor office suite. This allows information to flow, independently of what office suite each user uses to access the documents.

For the Geneva school system, it means having software that is easier to maintain and far more stable. What's most important, Ubuntu is proving easier to use for everyone involved.

For me, the best part is that the children using the computers are going to be exposed to using free software from an early age. This means that they are going to grow up without the false ideas that free software is hard to use, or at least as capable as any proprietary software. Which means, that they wont learn skills that lock them to a certain software from a single company.

There are several other examples, like Munich ditching Windows and Office for good, give the open source community at large the legitimacy it deserves. Not only that, it makes it easier to advocate to more cities and companies to make the move and follow suit.

In more than ways, open source can use them as examples that it works and it's can be the tool that people need to move forward.

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