Hello,
Confidentially to team@:
A member of the Helsinki city council and member of Finnish parliament, Johanna Sumuvuori (green party), made an initiative signed by 60 city council members last summer that the city of Helsinki should start using more free and open source software, with the primary incentive to save money in license payments. Since then I've been exchanging random e-mail (and Facebook) messages with her about he matter.
Last Friday she organised a meeting where she, Jyrki Kasvi (MP and Espoo city council member, green party), his assistant and Markku Rautio (IT chief of Helsinki City). I and Martin von Willebrand where there as representatives of FSFE.
The atmosphere at the meeting was very free and friendly, and we agreed to that the discussion would be confidential so that opinions and ideas could be exchanged without restrictions. Our main argument (which we agreed upon in prior with Martin) was that even though the short-term expenses to migrate to OpenOffice, other FOSS and eventually maybe Linux desktops might be larger than going one with the current Microsoft solutions, it would still be beneficial in the long term. In the current situation Microsoft controls both the cost of their licences and they also control the cost of a possible migration by being deliberately incompatible in file formats and APIs. We suggested that the city should work to decrease the migration costs, so that either Microsoft lowers it's fees or the migration becomes economically attractive. Either way would suit as and serve the public good. Although we also argued, that the open way of doing things is also likely to increase competition, quality and innovation. We also handed over some VALO-CD's and a copy of the French Gendarmerie case printed from OSOR.EU.
Our goal for the meeting was also to establish credibility, trust and lay grounds for future relations and I think we succeeded in that. The city is investigating possible migration paths, and immediately as the first step Helsinki is going to install OpenOffice on all city workstations alongside the current MS Office. It is hard to tell what Markku Rautio's true opinion and intentions about the issue was, but there is a possibility that things would start to go in a good direction. We'll now just have to wait and see what happens. Microsoft is also likely to strike back in some way.
Note that this is still confidential and you can't talk about this until the city makes its official announcements. That might happen in March earliest. Also note that COSS has laid the foundations for this kind of work and positive environment for FOSS in Finland, so are just adding water to the mill to go faster.
Your man in Helsinki,
Otto