Ministry of Trade and Industry prefers Firefox
The Ministry of Trade and Industry of Finland has switched to Mozilla Firefox as the browser of choice. The decision is an outcome of an internal project to enhance security of the operating environment at the Ministry. Internet Explorer can still be used for sites that have been proven secure or that require browser specific features.
I think this means about 300 people, but it seems the Finnish government is slowly moving to free solutions.
Ministry of Justice Prefers XML
A report (in Finnish) by the Finnish Ministry of Justice recommends the ministry to partially migrate to OpenOffice from the current combination of Lotus Smartsuite and Microsoft Office. According to the report, this combination would be replaced by a combination of OpenOffice (8500 workstations or 85% of the users) and Microsoft Office (1500, 15%). The switch seems to have been motivated by cost issues and OpenOffice’s support of the OpenDocument format. The report refers to the Valoris report criticizing WordML for not being complete open as it contains closed binary components.
Here’s a cost comparison from the report regarding three different options they had (page 25):
| Smartsuite (70%), Microsoft Office (30%) | Full Microsoft Office (100%) | OpenOffice (85%), Microsoft Office (15%) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| License purchases | 423 000 e | 3 315 500 e | 349 000 e |
| License maintenance | 1 874 000 e | 5 186 000 e | 2 004 500 e |
| Training, support | 500 000 e | 880 000 e | 1 155 000 e |
| Conversion of existing documents and applications | 75 000 e | 445 000 e | 685 000 e |
| Total | 2 872 000 e | 9 826 500 e | 4 193 500 e |
