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

Re:Metric and Imperial

[pnot]

> In the US, they are more commonly referred to as English units .

... which makes the whole mess even more hilarious, given the discrepancies even between U.S. and U.K. measurement. So, for example, an imperial pint (as used in England) is 568 ml, but an *English* pint (as used in the U.S. but, of course, never in England) is 454 ml.

Mind you, if you were in England and mentioned an "English pint", people would generally assume you meant an "Imperial pint" (568 ml), whereas if you wanted to refer to an "English pint" as defined above, you'd probably call it an "American pint".

Apoologies for using metric units in the above. A purist might have gone for the thoroughly intuitive original definition of the imperial pint, i.e. one-eighth of the volume of 10 lb of pure water at 62 degrees Fahrenheit. (And if you're going to ask whether that's a Troy, Avoirdupois or European pound, piss off.)

Bleaugh. I think I need a pint now.