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EU Studies Linux Migration
LeftOfCentre writes "The Register reports that the European Commision, the executive arm of the 380 million population European Union, has decided to spend 250,000 Euros on studying how government computers in EU states could be migrated to Linux and open source."
However, many persons in the EU are aware of the perils of depending upon a single vendor and their propietary formats, and also how ill-served we are when pushing documents around between PCs configured for different languages.
I think more and more business' will be considering this, faced with the soaring costs and big-brother-esque EULA clauses that go hand in hand with the likes of windows/office etc. Maybe this will cause the number of jobs in the intustry to soar, esp regarding Linux know-how. All in all this seems to be a good thing :)
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
Does anyone else get the impression that this will be yet another area where, yet again, Europe is going to be WAY out in front of the US. Europe and progressive social policy (or, if you live there, I guess you'd just call it "social policy" :) ) are practically synonymous and the US is once again made to look like a country run by bankers... Government is a public institution. Therefore, in my mind, it makes perfect sense for a government (a democratic one at least) to setup it's IT infrastructure based around a platform created by the people for the people rather than a platform that lines the pockets of a monlithic corporation (and, in this case, a foreign one at that).
Chris
I know most European nations are generally socialist at their core and tax their citizens quite heavily. Is a migration to Linux going to mean lower cost of government operation and lower taxes? Or is the money that they save just going to go to some other bloated government program?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
The UK government recently (relatively) spent a lot of money with microsoft to introduce a "gateway" system for several things for use by the UK population (I dont know if it is implemented, but a good example is tax returns)
I wonder if how to solve "initiatives" like that will be taken into consideration - since afaik there is no OSS solution for the existing implementation, and their gateway would have to be rethought/designed/implemented to move to OSS
Honestly they did
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
I guess this is good news. For a start, it is quite important to us European what the EU recommends. A well-funded, unbiased and "robust" study of Linux and free software should be welcomed. To start with, it will provide Linux with plenty of limelight. It will also point out things which need to be sorted out, and it will give more clout to people in European (or elsewhere) organisations that need pretty PDF documents with "this page is left blank intentionally" in order to be convinced. :-)
It would be great if this study actually comes up with reasonable comments and maybe a HOWTO. If you speak Spanish, you can see what I guess is the desired output of this project (as applied to one of Spain's ministeries) here.
Also, note that this is mainly a desktop study, not a server or file format study (the EU has already carred out a number of these in the past). So someone is taking Linux seriously!
I'm glad to see this happening.
I've been pretty turned off by some of the sales practices that I have seen by large software companies. I think that it makes much more sense for governments to pool their resources and develop free software instead of licensing commercial packages.
MS licensing fees are not unreasonable but they do add up when you are talking about so many users. At least I haven't seen them selling 2 licenses for every govt employee.
A couple of years ago, an Oracle reseller sold the state of CA more licenses than they had users to use. I've seen it happen with other software companies. I'd love to see CA move to an open source database and tell Oracle to kiss their butts. It would serve them right.
The Commission tends to attract the brightest civil servants, and actually if you ever have to deal with it, it shows. Think West Wing in several languages. And no, I don't work for it and am never likely to.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
That sounds a lot like the Sun Ray. I can't find any info GCI from Taiwan (those who can read Chinese could look here to see if GCI==gci.com.tw. It looks like an ordinary retailer.) Does GCI sell Sun Rays, or do they have a new solution?
US $467-per-box seems surprisingly high (conversion by xe.com/ucc/) for a thin client. Thin clients (at least the ones I've seen) are usually built around stripped-down architectures -- essentially, a USB controller, a video card, a NIC, and the minimum that's needed to tie them together. Then again, if you toss in the price of an LCD monitor (space concerns) and a smart card reader, $467 may be reasonable.
Does anyone know what GCI sells? The Oracle of Google doesn't reveal anything about GCI and "smart card" or "thin client". (It does reveal a page saying that there is a "ANSWER GCI LTD", originally from Taiwan, in Telford, but supplies no details beyond the fact that they're in "computer sales.") If they're a reseller, reselling thin clients, I would be intrigued to discover which ones.
Don't forget that the EC is only a tiny fraction of size of all combined EU governments. If the EC is spending 250K Euros (an insignificant amount really IMO), it signals that all combined, there is 10s or 100s of millions being spent on investigating open source.
Oh absolutely! Smashing British Rail into smithereens and a bankrupt infrastructure company was a master stroke.
Where else in Europe can you still get a sense of danger and adventure when riding the train?
Ah nostalgia: The service level and efficiency of what remains from the English rail system is now comparable with the one in Bulgaria in the 50s.
Yeah, your Ms. Thatcher sure had a clue...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
They don't have much money but they have a huge need for computers, so Linux is their best choice.
And they are going to enter EU pretty soon.