After the much-publicised decision by the Venezuelan government to spurn closed-source solutions and invest in open source software, other South American countries began to follow suit. Reportedly Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and now Peru all have plans to switch to open source over the next decade.

And now the idea is beginning to gather global momentum, with the report from Associated Press that the Dutch government has a soft deadline to move all government agencies on to open source software by April 2008. That's a pretty agressive schedule!

Is this a sign of things to come? NobleProg certainly believes so. Open source software has finally reached maturity in that one crucial area it lacked for mass take-up - the interface. In practically every other way it has been out-stripping the closed source competition for years, but the fear-factor caused by the lack of GUIs so commonplace in open source software always kept the wary at bay.

But no longer, it seems. We at NobleProg see it every day:

Our operating system of choice is Ubuntu, and it just works.

We test our software with JMeter via the Java interface and it's functional, simple and works on every operating system you could possibly think of. It even records our actions through it's own proxy so we don't have to spend ours assigning dull actions by hand to programmed "users".

We use Eclipse as our SDK, again, Java-based and totally cross-platform.

We create our sales presentations in OpenOffice Impress. And we have no problems. In fact, OpenOffice entirely replaces other office software suites and we don't miss them at all. Not one single feature.

So it's hardly surprising most of our UK training is done on open source software, even though we also offer good, closed source product courses.

And of course, should the Dutch government need any assistance......