More Linux Activity in German Government

__past__ writes "The decision of the bavarian capital city Munich to switch their desktop systems to Linux has caused a lot of discussion, and has been widely regarded as an important step for Linux on the desktop. And even if Microsoft tried hard to make their offerings more attractive since, including a special license contract that could save the public sector 'a lot of money' according to interior minister Otto Schily, it looks as if Munich was only the beginning."

"9 more cities in Rheinland-Pfalz, including the capital Mainz, are seriously considering to replace most, if not all of their Microsoft software with Linux after their current contracts expire in early 2004, noting that there are many other cities in a similar situation, and with similar plans.

Meanwhile, the police in Niedersachsen (german) is busy rolling out RedHat Linux on 11,620 desktops and 120 servers, running both standard Linux software and a custom information system called "Nivadis" based on WebLogic and Oracle running on Itanium servers, citing savings of about EUR 20 Mio compared with a Windows-based solution.

In a less desktop-related project, the state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern started a project with SuSE, IBM and others porting a mission-critical system called ProFiskal from Reliant Unix to Linux on zSeries, again citing cost as the primary reason, but also noting the benefits of using open standards for both software developers and users."

Comments

At least one western country

[Krapangor]

which isn't totally owned by the industry and where the goverment strives to work in the interest of their citizens. The situation in the US is much worse they even start wars just to give some companies more revenues. This makes me wonder when France starts to adopt Linux.

Re:Metric and Imperial

[pe1chl]

That probably is because US citizens cannot think of any empire besides their own.

Re:Bavaria rulez!

[Knuckles]

good education for the few, right. It's easy to have high standards in education if you are so selective that you are actually educating fewer people than you need yourself. Bavaria is importing people with Abitur and academic education from other German states.