In 2008, a common proposal from the University of Applied Sciences in Vaasa and the Umea University received funding from the Botnia-Atlantica Interreg programme (which supports cross-border cooperation in the Nordic countries) and local administrations to create a common Open Kvarken project that would foster the use of OSS by public administrations.
The objective of this project is to check existing OSS technology for the use of public administrations. The scope of the project covers public administrations in the Kvarken region.
The project has shown significant success in the direction of increased awareness on OSS towards the public sector. This was made possible by continuous dissemination through workshops and handouts, in parallel to the examination of OSS products for use by the public sector. The result is adoption of OSS by the public sector in several municipalities in the region, which has become a case to be studied for wider adoption as well. The Open Kvarken project has shown that there are significant cost savings in the use of OSS when taking into account all affected cost factors: procurement costs, operational costs, and also hardware costs and the effect of the support services that do not need to be imported.
Background
The main objective of Open Kvarken is to bring Open Source solution alternatives to the public sector. The private sector is also encouraged to offer support for Open Source solutions in the public sector. The interest in sharing software between different authorities is growing and the ownership of the source code by the public sector can provide significant savings. This way the public sector only needs to buy services to adapt the source code to its specific needs. According to the Project Manager of the Finnish crew Rainer Lytz, “Here the Open Kvarken project can offer information and change of attitudes in our own regions”. The Open Kvarken project (Kvarken is the name of the archipelago between Sweden and Finland) is funded by Botnia-Atlantica and local authorities in Sweden and Finland.
Lead partner in the project is the Vasaa University of Applied Sciences (VAMK), Finland in collaboration with the Umeå University, Sweden. The project aims to advance the cooperation and development in the Kvarken region and the two universities in particular. A significant incentive is the increased interest in moving to OSS and other work in progress, especially on Open Office. One of the objectives of the project has been to commercialise Open Source projects in the sense that commercial companies are invited to offer services around OSS-based solutions. In this direction, part of the project funding (200 000 €) has been provided to the Open Kvarken project for public tenders.
This Open Kvarken project was based on the Open Source philosophy from the start. In the project proposal it was stated that all code to be developed should be licensed under GPL v.2.0. The Vaasa University of Applied Sciences has had Open Source projects since 2004. The name of the first project was BIOS – Business in Open Source. The Open Kvarken project has tried to help the local Regional Council of Ostrobothnia to adapt an Open Source strategy since they already have an Open Access strategy for Broadband. The project has developed guidelines for such an Open Source Strategy but it has not been implemented yet.
Budget and funding
The Open Kvarken project has a budget of 1 700 000 €, which is distributed as follows:
- 50% comes from the Botnia-Atlantica programme, which is co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund;
- 25% from the Västerbotten County Administrative Board (in Swedish);
- 17% from the Regional Council of Ostrobothnia;
- 7 % from the Vasaa University of Applied Sciences.
The project duration is three years, up to August 31, 2011; however, the project results will remain available after the project completion through the two competence centres created as part of the project in Sweden and Finland.
Lessons learnt
The use of OSS by public administrations can bring significant cost savings if one tries to observe the global picture. An aspect influenced from the use of OSS is the effect OSS use has on the necessary hardware. In the YLE-FST news program on Open Kvarken, Kenneth Nickull from the Vörå-Maxmo municipality says: “Just because a computer is too old to run Windows doesn’t mean it can’t be used to run Linux”. Longer hardware life means reduction in hardware costs, which adds up to the cost savings that are expected from the use of OSS instead of proprietary software.
According to Rainer Lytz, the following are some of the main lessons learned:
- Open Source is an applied science and perfect for Universities.
- Open Source should be integrated into the curriculum.
- Universities are the perfect place for testing Open Source Software -COSS network.
- IT Students can write their theses about OSS and produce documentation, and translations.
- Universities can test and commercialise mature OSS.
- Universities can teach local ICT companies how to cooperate with OS Communities –Open Tenders (if enterprise driven) and include programmers from communities on their payroll.
- R&D units at Universities can help local ICT companies to reuse code and in this way lower development costs for new software.
- The Universities can help the Public Sector in writing program specifications and requiring open source licenses when purchasing software.
- OSS can create local jobs and prevents export of license fees from our regions.
Another point made by Mr. Lytz in the abovementioned news program is that the use of OSS by public administrations creates an ecosystem of local supporting companies. This means that the cost of support stays within the region and is not exported.
Conclusions
The Open Kvarken project has studied an important number of open source products for their use by public administrations. According to the information already made available from its website, the project has received a warm welcome by several public administrations within the Kvarken region that have adopted the OSS solutions proposed by Open Kvarken.
The use of OSS by public administrations in the region has proved that there are significant benefits for them and that OSS can be part of cost-effective and viable solutions when all medium- and long-term factors have been taken into account. Such factors include the reduced cost of ownership, the procurement of installation, maintenance, training and operational services at competitive prices from local service providers, and the benefits from the increased life expectancy of computer hardware, thus also contributing to the Green Government initiative.