Oregon is considering a bill that would put open source software as the preferred vendor, as it were, and require agencies to justify using closed, for-fee software.

It's probably too broad, despite my love of and use of open-source, free, and similar software. A good response on it comes from a Microsoftee who identifies the costs of running any kind of software. It's not free. You need hardware, staff, training, support, development.

Where open-source really shines at a municipal level has to be on the server front. Forget client licenses. You may or may not like Office, but it's a universal product that's used everywhere, and you have to fight like heck to find something comparable that'll read and write its formats. Someday, there may be a real competitor, but I still use Word and Excel every day. (Fortunately, I've switched to Keynote for presentations from PowerPoint; PowerPoint has always lacked sophistication and ease of use.)

On the server end, though, the licenses to support even moderate numbers of users escalate fast. Customization requires in-house or outsourced programming where it's possible, and it's always tacked-on. With Red Hat Linux, MySQL, Apache, PHP, BerkeleyDB, perl, and other open-source and GNU projects, however, I can take a new Intel-based PC with a 20 or 30 Gb hard drive and within maybe two hours have the equivalent of a $10,000 to $50,000 set of licenses from Microsoft, Oracle, or other database/enterprise server software makers.

For many businesses, perhaps for most municipalities, anything outside core complexities, like managing pensions, budgets, and employee salaries, deploying an open-source alternative is much cheaper and easier, and free tech support is available from peers online, plus free adaptations to code and other benefits. If I'm building a database of 10,000 vendors that consumers could consider to hire as licensed sewer repair contractors, I need robustness, of course, and I have to build an interface to search and update it. But those interfaces already exist in many iterations on Sourceforge and elsewhere.

I wouldn't push open-source products for business software replacement yet for governments. But on the back-end, it's a way to shave a lot of licensing fees without increasing the necessary expertise or expense.

I think public organizations should specify that all file formats used to distribute data should be publicly specified. This would mean that public documents should be stored and transmitted, for example, in RTF or ASCII rather than MS Word DOC format.

This would also mean that newer versions of software would not make older documents difficult or impossible to view and/or modify.