Firefox, the browser that dared to challenge the supremacy of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, has just reached 400m downloads - and deservedly so. It now claims a market share of nearly 20% in the UK and 30% in Germany. Firefox, part of the admirable Mozilla Foundation, is based on open source, created and improved on by volunteers all over the world. The cooperative spirit that infused the open source movement is now taking over the world as people and corporations collaborate on music, videos, products or the Wikipedia. All of which makes it scandalous that the open source movement has not taken off in the UK as it has in other countries.

You would have thought that a Labour government, struggling to marry the success of market forces with the socialist endowment of its founding fathers, would have latched on to this new cooperativism which brings people together for a common purpose with a burning zeal. In fact, its wanton neglect could damage our economic prospects.

The depth of its neglect was made plain by speakers at a seminar last week hosted by Westminster eForum, which tries to make parliament aware of IT issues. It turns out, in contrast to what other governments are doing, that most departments - including Health, Work and the Foreign Office - are so risk-averse they have virtually no open source in their IT infrastructures. The Treasury runs less than 1% of its operations with open source. The Conservatives, who rightly believe Labour is vulnerable in this area, claim that nearly £700m could be saved by switching to open source. This is disputed by others who point to the high initial cost of switching from an embedded system and retraining everyone. But in the long run, low maintenance costs plus the absence of licence fees and upgrade charges must give open source the edge and, even if it didn't, there is still a strong case for encouraging it because a workforce skilled in open source would be well placed to exploit the enormous opportunities opening up for the future.

Schools are not much better, a double tragedy because they not only don't benefit from savings but also lose the opportunity to train children in the skills of the future. Equally serious is the indifference of small companies. This, we were told, was down to a suspicion that anything that is free can't be any good.

This is not a view shared by Google or Amazon - both huge users of open source. It was strongly disputed by a representative from Malmaison, the very cool hotel group which has put most of its operations on to open source for one simple reason: "high performance and low cost". Alfresco, a British software company which has been successful in the US and has a 100,000 user project with the European Commission, reported that barely 5% of its business is in the UK.

The flagship of open source is the Linux operating system, a potential rival to Windows. It operates successfully in lots of places, including a Nokia N800 mobile device I have been testing, where it works apparently faultlessly in the background. But, despite improvements, including Ubuntu, its latest highly regarded incarnation, Linux still gives the impression of being made by engineers for engineers and hasn't made the critical jump to consumer friendliness. This can be seen in comments on websites to help you install Ubuntu such as: "It's normal that WinXP doesn't see your Linux partition. Disk management in XP admin tools will." Easily understood by a geek but a turnoff for someone who wants an easy consumer experience.

Which is exactly what Mozilla has managed to do with Firefox, which is easy to download and modify. They have even taken away some functions to reduce the "button count". Maybe Mozilla's marketing skills should be harnessed by Linux to turn a wonderful product into something people actually want to use.

vic.keegan@theguardian.com

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