The Netherlands Patent Office and the Netherlands Competition Authority are the first of the countries national government bodies switching to an Open Source desktop.
The ministry of Economic Affairs announced last week that the two institutes are preparing to switch to a complete open source IT infrastructure. The ministry last week published plans to make certain open standards obligatory as of April 2008. It also demands all governmental bodies to have plans ready in early 2009 to increase the use of Open Source software. As part of the plan, the ministry is actively seeking governmental departments willing to migrate their desktop environment to Open Source.
The Patent Office (Octrooicentrum Nederland) is the first such institute. It will migrate its 155 PCs in 2008, expects Tjeerd van der Laan, head of the IT department. Probably, the institute will opt for a thin client infrastructure and select either the Red Hat or Suse GNU/Linux distributions.
Van der Laan does not expect the migration to be easy. "Our applications link with those of the ministry of Economic Affairs, the World Intellectual Property Organization and other organisations. We agree with the Minister for Foreign Trade Frank Heemskers that switching to Open Source stimulates innovation. As a Patent Ofice, we like to be among the front runners to use such innovations."
The Netherlands Competition Authority is in the very early stages of the migration. A spokesperson confirmed that plans were being drafted. The competition authority has some 378 employees.
The two institutes are the first national government bodies switching their desktops to Open Source. Recently, Groningen was the first province to announce that it is studying to use OpenOffice, a suite of Open Source office applications. And several city councils, such as Heerenveen, Groningen and Amsterdam are either migrating to OpenOffice or studying such a move.
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