Using free and open source software has kept the administration of the Latvian city of Valmiera technologically independent. According to Kaspar Urbans, head of the city's IT department, this type of software also helps to disclose public information and makes it easier for administrations to cooperate.
"All public administrations should be interested in this type of software, for applications built on this are more sustainable", says Urbans. "Our technological independence is a strategic goal. We do not want to rely on a specific technology. For this, using standards is key."
The Valmiera administration uses open source software for almost every IT task, Urbans showed in a presentation at the annual conference of the Latvian Open Technology Association (LATA), a trade organisation, on 18 January in the capital Riga.
The IT department manages a thousand workstations and forty-one servers, including 37 virtual ones. It uses several Linux distributions, including CentOS, Debian, Slackware and Ubuntu, and uses these to run mostly server-side applications, including Apache for webservers, Asterisk and Hylafax for telephony, Dovecot for mail servers, the Drupal content management system, Postgresql for its databases.
Open source is also often used on the desktop. The city for instance uses the suite of office productivity tools OpenOffice, web-browser Firefox, email client Thunderbird, image manipulation program Gimp and media player VLC.
Sharing
"We will use open software whenever suitable, based on an analysis of the costs and the benefits, including for the city's technological independence", Urbans says. He adds that this kind of software is easier to implement on the servers. "The users do not care what software is used, their interest is in the provided services."
The biggest challenge is to get more of the local IT companies to provide open source services. "We would like to get more regional companies to help us with this, for example to deal with emergency situations."
The city has also started a website to share the software it is developing with citizens and other administrations. Urbans: "That site, open.valmiera.lv, is only a few days old, so do not expect too much. We are updating it with information about the open source software that we use in Valmiera, and are adding the manuals we wrote ourselves."
More information:
Kaspars Urbãns' presentation (in Latvian, pdf)