This text highlights the most important documents published by the tOSSad EU project.
Open standards instead of vendor lock-in
Better stability
Lower hardware and software costs
Endorsing cultural diversity
and more
It also includes a case study analysis of the migration to F/OSS in the public administration of Munich/Germany, Extremadura/Spain, Vienna/Austria, the French tax system, etc.
Download Economical and Social Benefits of F/OSS.
Various tOSSad reports discuss national adoption of F/OSS focus on public administrations, because they are among the biggest computer hardware and software consumers world-wide. Every year they spend a substantial amount of money on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software licenses. By using appropriate technologies, such expenses might be either dramatically reduced or re-routed to further develop and support local business ecosystems. Additionally, F/OSS adoptions in PAs holds much promise for the overall public good.
The report F/OSS National Programme Start-Up Roadmap concludes that national programmes should promote, sustain and encourage the use of solutions preferably based on F/OSS framed with the principle of technological neutrality. It does so based on:
a SWOT (Streangths-Weeknesses-Opportunities-Threads) analysis for F/OSS
identifying case studies and lessons learned
policy recommendations
and more
Download F/OSS National Programme Start-Up Roadmap.
A report on the Current status of F/OSS in the target countries presents the results of a survey conducted among public administrators. The questionaire asked about F/OSS adoption factors such as product quality and support, financial, vendor, political and personal barriers. One interesting conclusion is that public officers who involve in legal F/OSS provision process more probably face more negative attitudes from their administration.
Download
Current status of F/OSS.
Another report entitled Guideline for F/OSS Adoption in Public Sector identifies roles public administrations can play in using and promoting F/OSS. It outlines several levels of adoption and a non-aggressive migration strategy for different platforms (server, desktop, etc.) and scenarios (health system, education, etc.).
Download
Guideline for F/OSS Adoption in Public Sector.
Usability is the top priority when it comes to acceptance of Open Source Software in mass markets. In this respect, tOSSad published three remarkable reports:
The F/OSS Usability Report, Part A proves based on a survey that some of the most popular Open Source software is indeed user-friendly. The survey included the following projects and a large number of respondents from across Europe answered the questionnaires:
OpenOffice.org (196 respondents)
Firefox (205 respondents)
GNU/Linux with GNOME or KDE desktop (274 respondents)
The report’s results in short are that these projects provide:
user-friendly interfaces
a clear menu
a logical navigation
convenient combinations of hot keys
a sufficient set of features
ease of installation
The survey includes some interesting charts with the details.
Download F/OSS Usability Report, Part A.
The F/OSS Usability Report, Part B discusses tomorrow's requirements of F/OSS usability:
usability of palmtops using FLOSS software (Nokia 770, Sony Mylo, Sharp Zaurus)
design guidelines for mobile applications
recommendations how to solve typical problems of FLOSS usability on mobile devices
The report derives the general recommendations from the mobile devices industry. Hence, it serves as a resource of information for developers, users and managers of Open Source projects who are concerned with usability.
Download
F/OSS Usability Report, Part B.
The third report called Usability Involvement in F/OSS Projects tackles the question how to achieve more usability within geographically distributed projects. Advice and recommendations how to solve this problem also include ideas how to attract and convince usability experts to participate in F/OSS projects.
Download
Usability Involvement in F/OSS Projects.
The F/OSS Curriculum report provides educational models for the study of F/OSS for e-learning, work-based learning and social (community-based) learning and proposes vocational curricula as well as one for a master program in higher education.
Downlaod
F/OSS Curriculum.
Another document labeled Methodology, Implementation Report and Tutorial to Build a F/OSS Laboratory includes hands-on tips how to set up a computer lab based on F/OSS.
Download
Methodology, Implementation Report and Tutorial to Build a F/OSS Laboratory.
There are plenty of other interesting reports available for download in the list of publications .