This is somewhat old news….
Well, most people use nothing but MS Office, so this should be fine. Commercial software is not necessarily safe from patent litigation either. A company as large as Microsoft can probably respond to some extent, but otherwise there is not much difference. Besides, filing a patent lawsuit against open-source software this prominent would mean “suicide” in the software industry.
Could something similar happen in Japan?
I hear some bank switched everything to MacOS.
Of course, some users will find migration difficult—for example, those who make intensive use of Excel macros.
Development should use open source or follow international standards. Otherwise it creates a large negative legacy, so it is best avoided.
The City of Munich, Germany, announced that it began migrating desktop PCs in city offices from Windows to Linux on September 19 (local time). The city is proceeding with a plan to migrate 10,0004000 desktop PCs from Windows to Linux.
According to the City of Munich, it began the migration after obtaining favorable interim results from its evaluation of the pilot phase. Migration began on Tuesday the 19th. According to U.S. media, 100 PCs were migrated in the first stage (an article in the U.S. publication ComputerWorld).
Linux and all applications are open-source software. The distribution is volunteer-based Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, the desktop environment is KDE 3.5, and the office software is OpenOffice.org 2.0.
Munich’s Linux migration plan has been under way since 2003 and was formally approved by the city council in June 2004. The city temporarily froze the migration plan in August 2004 because of concerns over software patents, but restarted the project in September 2004 after concluding that the patent risks of open-source software were no greater than those of closed software. It also announced the adoption of Debian GNU/Linux in 2005.
◎Related Material
◆City of Munich’s “LiMux” Linux Migration Project Page