I believe that Italian companies can make also big money from open source, QualiPSo is the living proof. Still large system integrators and solution providers are reluctant to approach open source beyond tactics, probably leaving on the table a number of opportunities.

About schools and IT skills, there are interesting alternatives to the ECDL, like INGOT, and we could save some money approaching IT education in similar ways.

From what I’ve seen of Italian graduates over the last five years or so, not many of them are particularly up-to-date in terms of IT. Most need lessons on how to use Excel, and very few seem to know that Word can check the spelling of English words automatically. In this day and age, I find this amazing, and worrying. I hate to think how much companies in Italy have to spend on training employees in basic computer skills.

Surely the Italian education system could devote a few hours to teaching high school students how to use Word and Excel - they would not have to invest in software either OpenOffice is free, and if you can use the open source equivalents of Word (Writer) and Excel (Calc), then using Word and Excel would be easy.

Open source software is not popular institutionally in Italy because no money can be made from supplying it! The infamous ‘interests’ at play, one fears.

Best,

Alex in Milan, Italy - and an open source fan too

“One computer in any classroom”: this morning’s buzz. For doing what? To teach how to start Word? Is that what we want our children become? Tamed monkeys?

cloud computing is increasingly going to be more and more important, even if government remains skeptical about the cloud. Despite Italian thought leaders at CNIPA - the National Centre for ICT in the Public. Administrations - take part in international conversations on e-government in cloud, regional and national IT laws are ignoring the cloud.

Tim O’Reilly says:

that a new kind of proprietary lock-in in the cloud.But just “paying attention” to cloud computing isn’t the point. The point is to rediscover what makes open source tick, but in the new context.

That’s why we open source and open standards advocates should be part of this process, since open source will fuel the growth of cloud computing anyway.