A spokesperson for the council told GC News that the current economic climate has led it to look at a number of different options for savings.
“We are currently looking at all our options and open-source software happens to be one of the things we are looking at,” he said.
According to Computer Weekly, Birmingham’s business policy manager Gerry McMullan admitted that the council had a “tangled history with open-source software” and that its past experiments with open systems had delivered mixed results.
“Like all authorities, what we are facing at the moment are fairly significant cuts. Any potential cost-reduction business case is receiving serious scrutiny,” he said, speaking at a Westminster eForum meeting. “So we will be looking again at some of the cost aspects of open source.”
He also revealed that he thought Birmingham’s major outsourcing deal with Capita had distracted the council’s IT department from open source, but admitted staff had not been supportive of early trials of the software.
“The open-source aspect went off the boil because we were really focused on Capita
Source:http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/it-at-work/2010/09/29/birmingham-council-reconsiders-open-source-software-40090326/
