Croatia's Step towards Open Source (Score 2, Informative)

Hi all! As a Croat I just had to post something to clarify... Croatia is a young country, and therefore we had to build our IT program infrastructure from close to nothing, meaning not many legacy problems. Being a small country (for a great holiday:) ), changes to this type of things is easier that applying the same to the US - imagine having to teach all the employees new tricks or worse new programs. Croatia has had a very long tradition of unix, and later linux usage. Our academic network http://www.carnet.hr/ is a long time promoter of OSS. All universities in Croatia run a Debian distro modified to suit every need of the students, teachers,... And new trends are constantly implemented. The same program is offered to secondary schools (and in a small extent to primary schools). Croatia has created an office for implementing new technologies called eHrvatska http://www.e-hrvatska.hr/ and they have been working on it for some 2-3 years now. At first there was no sign of actitity from them, but in the last year they brought to the public a series of interesting services nationwide (eVAT, eLearning, e), digitizing courts, land-ownership books,... Croatia was one of the first countries to include Digital signature into its legislation, opening the way for eBusiness and eGovernment. Even The head of Croatian Linux User Community is sceptical because Croatia has a deal with Microsoft for supplying MS software for all government needs, but it has become clear the money just leaves the country without any intent to come back. Making a WinXP and Office localization was a nice gesture, but nothing more. We have smart people, good programmers with great ideas making software for foreign countries. Why not earn some money at home by making software for home... I personally don't care if the move is made because of money issues, creating a software demand will mean jobs for programmers, and better service for citizens.