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Microsoft Alternative in Extremadura, Spain

Posted by timothy on from the penguins-come-in-all-sizes dept.

grylnsmn writes "The Washington Post today has a front page article talking about how the Extremadura region in Spain is converting all government offices, businesses, and home from Windows to Linux. The article talks of their problems last spring and how the community banded together to solve them. "But the glitches are more an annoyance, [Ana Acevedo, who heads one of the government's document-processing units] said, than a hassle. 'It's mostly very tiny things,' she said." Overall, this is an important testbed for localities all over the world who are looking at making the switch. Overall, a very good and balanced article." Update: 11/03 20:37 GMT by T : Headline misspelled "Extremadura" as "Extramadura" -- fixed now.

2 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. sure, it ain't a war... by domeng24ph · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Microsoft regards such talk as too dramatic and distracting. It is software, after all, not war, company officials said. It is far more productive in their view to talk about the technical aspects of Windows vs. Linux."

    but consider a microsoft philippines job ad

    one of the responsibilities of the job microsoft is offering is...

    "Demolish competition by knowing everything they do and thwarting their every move in the relevant spaces"

    that's a microsoft developer evangelist for you...

  2. Re:But Its Not Possible by rseuhs · · Score: 5, Interesting
    As a Linux-user I'm so sick of the Microsoft case that I almost which they would just set them free just this thing is over.

    I'm sick of morons who don't get it. (Microsoft broke an agreement goddamnit. They agreed not to bundle IE with Windows and they did bundle IE with Windows at the next possiblitly.)

    I'm sick of monopoly-whiners constantly complaining. We don't need whiners, we need a positive, optimistic attitude in the Linux community.

    Let's face it: The US-government is both incompetent and corrupt.

    There is no hope that the US-government will ever reintroduce a free, open and capitalistic market in the OS space (yes, you read that right. The market is not open. The force-bundelings of Windows are more close to communism than Linux can ever become), we will have to do that ourselves.

    Let's forget that courtcase and move on.

    And it can be done. All the mainstream software is right available. - Just show the software to users. All users I showed Mozilla to loved it (either because of tabbed browsing or because of ad-blocking). It's harder to convert the whole platform, but I've done that for a couple of users, too. After initial glitches and minor problems, it's much better and problem-free than any Windows installation.