The Open Sourcerer

An element of comedy in the open source cable of the day, this one is from Latvia in 2008. The country is facing significant economic issues and they are trying to reduce their public sector costs. They are OK with reducing spending, cutting staff, postponing wage increases, but if that doesn’t work they will have to take drastic measures . . .
http://wikileaks.org/cable/2008/10/08RIGA644.html

Next year’s central government budget proposal, which the Cabinet
of Ministers has now submitted to the parliament for review, has
dominated the headlines in Latvian media in recent weeks. The
Cabinet has been struggling to prepare a budget with a target
deficit rate of 1.85% of GDP by reducing ministry spending,
eliminating staff positions, postponing planned wage increases for
public sector employees, and even proposing measures as drastic as
closing specific ministries and switching to open source software.
Labor unions and other affected parties have met these proposals
with strong condemnation.

Sounds like switching to open source would release a saving in the order of magnitude of closing a ministry.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 6th, 2011 at 9:19 by Alan Bell and is filed under FLOSS in the news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.