Inspired by the decision of the government of Munich to migrate to open source software, Scott Morris has compiled an impressive list of migrations to open source from around the world. You should take a look at his entire list (almost 100 examples) but some of the highlights, relevant to us, include the governments of Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, Japan, Norway, Israel, China, Spain, Australia, South Korea, Indonesia, France, Austria and a bunch more. He also lists some major corporations including the Royal Bank of Scotland, the biggest bank in China, Amazon, the US Postal Service, Telstra, DoCoMo, Travelocity, Tommy Hilfiger, NASA and a lot more of these, too. The open source momentum just keeps on going.

In 2006, the United Nations produced a report called Breaking Barriers: The Potential of Free and Open Source Software for Sustainable Human Development. It was a compilation of case studies from around the world which described the impact of actual free software initiatives that made an impact in the developing world. It has come back into the news because an organization called Zea Partners has recently released supplemental case studies that they’ve been involved with, mostly centering around the use of Plone, a Python-based CMS that many of the NXS developers have implemented for the Brazilian government. This is a great idea — to take the original United Nations document which describes case studies and, in a distributed way, keep it updated with supplemental reports about case studies. Many of the side projects that NXS developers are involved with could be put together in a report like this and we are currently discussing doing exactly what Zea Partners has done. This “living compilation” of case studies could go on and on, showing to the world the incredible impact of open source and free software.