Will Munich's Linux Desktops Be Running Windows?

An anonymous reader writes "Remember that story about the city of Munich choosing Linux to power 14,000 desktop computers? One aspect of this story that most people don't know about is that up to 80 percent of those Linux desktops will be equipped with VMWare, a virtual machine emulator, under which they will run Windows and Windows applications. That's right, folks: The majority of those 'Linux desktops' will be used to run ... Windows." This Gartner report from early June seems to be the one mentioned in the article, though I'm not sure exactly where Thurrott gets the 80% figure.

Comments

Re:Licensing?

[arivanov]

At least in the US - can't say for Germany.

Germany is the only country in the world where this MSFT practice has been shot down in courts as a restraint of trade. AFAIK In Germany you can recycle windows licenses and they cannot be tied to machines and you can resell them as well.

In btw: I see nothing wrong in using vmware as a transitions strategy. Been there myself until openoffice reached a point where it became really useable