Including new purchases and maintenance, my Department spent a total of €729,996 on software licences during 2002. Of this amount, €212,325 was spent on products of the company referred to by the Deputy. My Department has taken the strategic decision to develop all business applications in an open source development environment. One of the principal reasons for this strategic approach was because of the advantages of being system independent, both hardware and operating. The application development uses a large number of open source software to develop and test the applications and publication to the Internet will be through an open source web server.
My Department's information systems division uses a number of open source software packages, including the software referred to by the Deputy, to manage and monitor all the Department's networks and servers. Our overall approach is geared to using, and promoting the use of open source software where this is appropriate and cost effective. The open source community would generally agree that the general use of open source software in a corporate environment is only now becoming a realistic proposition. While the initial costs of open source software are very low, it does require a larger technical effort to support going forward with resultant cost implications.
