State of New Hampshire Votes for Open Source

The legislative arm of the US state of New Hampshire has passed an act that requires the state's agencies to consider open source software for all new software acquisitions. The act itself spells out the benefits of open source over proprietary software in very clear and cogent terms, covering costs, long term data accessibility, interoperability and the use of open standards.

The act states that the cost of obtaining software and the personnel costs of maintaining it have become significant and that both of these costs can be reduced significantly by the use of open source. On long-term data accessibility, the act says that accessibility to that data should "be independent of the goodwill of the state's computer system suppliers and the conditions imposed by these suppliers". A similar point is made regarding the long-term use of software and that such use and data access should be completely within the state's control...