Japanese government contemplates open source

Linuxworld reports that the Japanese government wants to use open source to reduce its reliance on a single vendor IT software infrastructure.

A consortium of 10 major suppliers including Oracle, NEC, IBM, HP, Hitachi and Dell is being formed to develop and sell Linux servers and computers to the Japanese market. This follows the Japanese government’s announcement of its wish to make Linux and open source a priority for all IT procurements from July 2007. The government says it plans to spend around 1.25 trillion yen (£5.24 bn) on IT over the next year. The government has said explicitly it wants to decrease its reliance on Microsoft as a server platform.

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