This old story gets even more ridiculous. The fact that the head of the national library is a co-chair and obvious supporter of M$’s OOXML specification, led our National Archive to spend yet more money with Microsoft for a solution that will actually NOT fix the problem. More documents will be stored in a, as yet non-standardised and closed, document format. That will, eventually require us to spend even more money yet again just to get access to old electronic documents.

It seems our antipodean partners have come up with a solution: It’s called Xena. And it’s Open Source and uses the GPL.

Xena is free and open source software developed by the National Archives of Australia to aid in the long term preservation of digital records. Xena is an acronym meaning ‘Xml Electronic Normalising for Archives’.

Xena software aids digital preservation by performing two important tasks:

• Detecting the file formats of digital objects
• Converting digital objects into open formats for preservation

Now this sounds like a very decent solution. Read that last bullet once more:

• Converting digital objects into open formats for preservation

Adam Farquhar and the National Archive of Great Britain please take note…

Tell Someone Else!

I just came across this story.

Well blow me down with a feather…

Open-source products accounted for a 13 percent share of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006, but should account for 27 percent of the market in 2011 when revenue is expected to be $169.2 billion, according to Gartner research.

Just think about that for a minute… Over a quarter of the whole software economy likely to be based on open source. That’s really big, nearly $45 billion. In less than 5 years time. Last year it accounted for about$12 billion; and that’s not too shabby in my opinion.

In another interesting quote we get,

Wurster also spoke on some of the market accelerators to open source, which included the low barriers to entry and increased return on investment, the availability of high-quality solutions at low cost, the access to open standards and development processes, vendor independence and flexibility—resulting in investment protection—and faster procurement and a shorter development time.

That sounds pretty compelling to me. I believe we should be showing this to our MPs. Perhaps they might finally grok the idea that not everything needs to come from Microsoft or SAP or Oracle. And that there are BETTER solutions, and not just cheaper alternatives.

We are at an very interesting point in IT and business history. Giving your products away for free is looking like a compelling business model. Although WE all know that anyway…

Tell Someone Else!