As part of the UK government-backed Open Source Academy, Bristol is one of the leading UK local authorities when it comes to deploying open standards and open source software. In March it detailed how it expected to make 60% office software savings my moving to Sun Microsystems Inc’s StarOffice.
In late 2004 Bristol decide to standardize on StarOffice for 5,000 desktop users, replacing a mix of suites that included Microsoft Corp’s Office, Corel Corp’s WordPerfect, and IBM’s Corp’s Lotus.
That decision enabled it to reduce TCO to GBP670,000 ($1.2m) over five years, compared to the potential cost of GBP1.7m ($3.0m) if it had gone with a proposed Microsoft solution, Bristol revealed in March, as it documented the whole process for other local authorities.
The council has now joined the ODF Alliance, which was set up in March by Sun, IBM, Novell, and Corel, as well as industry groups such as the American Library Association, the Software & Information Industry Association, and the Open Society Archives of the Central European University.
It now boasts over 200 members and earlier this month noted how initiatives in Belgium, France, and Denmark indicate growing support for the ISO-approved standard. Even Microsoft finally caved in and announced its intention to support ODF in the forthcoming Office 2007 last week. The company set up the open source the Open XML Translator project to create a translator that will enable Office to support ODF documents.
