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

Software Patents

[Elektroschock]

And thanks to Munich FFII Germany has the strongest anti-swpat movement...

In Munich they demontrated together with a social democrat politician Lochner-Fischer (Member of Bavarian House of representatives) that capaigned for Linux! See this picture with her election campaign banners.

Also European MEP Wolfgang Kreissl-Dorfler hold a speech at FFII demo munich.

German Wiki page about Munich demo

Note: As a Northern German I don't like Bavarian culture, but Munich is special, less ultra-conservative than the rest of Bavaria. As an European I am proud of the leading role of Europe in the current silent Open Source revolution.

Hopefully they will not not screw up the thing ...

[foobsr]

... since here (Germany) exists (at least from my point of view) the tradition to invest large amounts of money in 'government software projects' that turn out to be scrap in the end. If it works fine, this for sure will boost the acceptance of LINUX since the public sector (still) is an important customer to deal with. CC.

Re:Metric and Imperial

[Michael Wardle]

What is the proper name for "imperial" anyway?

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

District names

[alext]

Alternatively, in English:

Rheinland-Pfalz => Rhineland Palatinate
Niedersachsen => Lower Saxony
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern => Mecklenburg and Western Pomerania

Next you'll be spelling Hanover with two ns ;-)

Re:One word about Lochner-Fischer

[Bananenrepublik]

Funny you should say that, in the page I get it says:

<meta HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <meta NAME="Generator" CONTENT="handmade, handcraft"> <title>"Wirtschaftspolitik, Linux, Open-Source-Software, Entscheidung Muenchen, Microsoft"</title>

Re:Who will be ccontracted for the 9 cities ?

[__past__]

While SuSE is certainly the most important distro in germany (and, for example, was behind the Munich deal), I think it's quite interesting that the police desktops and servers will run Red Hat. You normally can see new SuSE releases prominently advertised in every bigger bookstore here; for a lot of people SuSE is Linux, they think they are running Linux 8.2 Professional. Finding an up-to-date Red Hat box can require some searching, sometimes you'll see Mandrake, but everything else is completly geek-only.

Canadian adoption of linux

[d3am0n]

Canada, having one of the most active e-governments in the world, is also being actively woo-ed by linux. At the chateau laurier in ottawa I attended the linux conference by IBM and while they did seem to ramble abit, they were being taken very seriously by the people in attendance. I guess the high amount of online government computers for vital functions probably plays a big part in most peoples minds about what sort of security and stability they want when it comes to their servers.

Re:Canadian adoption of linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't get too excited just yet. The major issues confronting senior decision-makers revolve around IT staff skill sets. Concerns abound about whether MS-trained people can effectively support Linux. The issue goes deeper than that. MS has made serious inroads into the educational curriculum in our institutions of higher learning in Canada. They are highjacking student mindshare and creating an army of drones who are incapable of thinking outside the MS box. The worry is that it's hard to get Linux certified IT people to implement the solution(s) required for government. The answer is to push for buy-in at the very highest levels. If a mandate comes down from on high, it generaly gets implemented (though don't count MS out - they will do what they can to sabotage the process).

The process of moving government to change internally is far, far harder to do than to change a policy or law. Take courage though, resistance is not futile, it just means a long, uphill battle.

Re:Will..

[WindBourne]

Capitalism vs. Socialistism
Even though you meant it as an insult and this line has been FUDed to death it still bears looking at.
MS got nailed for being a monopolists. That is that one company is in control. Worse yet, it is because they throw there weight around and make other companies do what they want. And if they do not do it, then MS would put them out of business (death penalty).
That is not capitalism.

Linux and BSD is offered for free. But only at its' code. The real money (and costs) in any OS is not the code, but in the support. That is offered for free by enthusiasts, but also for money by companies. In fact, it is in service that companies such as Redhat and SUSE are making profits. Others are trying to but still digging out of the dotcom line of thought (Mandrake). And others tought that they could do an MS approach (sell the binary and offer no real support) to Linux (Caldera being the most infamous), but in a competitive environment, it is impossible due to the fact that Linux is offered freely.
BTW, Linux keeps winning awards for support. Since it is offered for free via enthusiast, the capitalists companies have to work harder to make sure that they offer more for lower costs. But hey, that is what true capitalism does.

Linux is the most pure capitalism play, where only bottled water is more pure (pune intended).

Re:Metric and Imperial

[foobsr]

Not quite.

CC.

Re:Metric and Imperial

[Hoser McMoose]

In a lot of countries people have switched over to metric in a very half-assed manner, using metric (err, SI) units for some things and using imperial units for other things. I'm in Canada, and there are definitely a few definitely a few odd imperial measurements being thrown around.

I think the pint is pretty much a standard for beer the world over. Here you can occasionally get quart bottles of beer as well (primarily in dive bars, such as the one I frequented last night, which had fine quarts of Molson Ex. and Labatt 50 :> ). Most places also tend to talk about people's height in terms of feet and inches, while weight is usually thought of in pounds here. We also have a rather odd tendency to think of water temperature (for pools, lakes, etc.) in farenheit while air temperature in Celcius.

I was recently living in Ireland, and they are similarly half-assed converted to metric. They tend to talk about people's weight in stone, and many older Irish people I met seemed to have a very tough time with temps in Celcius, still sticking to farenheit. The one thing that really cracked me up there though was that all their speed limit signs and all the speed gauges in cars were always in miles/hour, but almost all of the distance signs on highways were in kilometers!

Re:Germ's goin' Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to use Linux, you need to be licenced to.

Bullshit. The GPL is a licence to copy. You don't need a licence to run software. The GPL even states that you can refuse to accept the GPL and still run the software.

Re:OpenOffice needs data analysis...

[sniggly]

Maybe dba.openoffice.org can help you out and if it doesn't have the tools you can probably request them. I've seen for myself how many faculties depend on MS to provide the tools and it locks the students into a corporately sponsored analytical method that ... well I don't think that needs elaboration. Above and beyond just openoffice, using linux would prepare soon to be chemists for working at companies that use unix mainframes and/or linux clusters for modelling complex chemical interactions (like in pharmaceutical research).

Getting dba.openoffice.org to work with for example mysql is pretty simple (you either need the odbc or jdbc driver from mysql.com), from then on it's a lot like working in ms access.

Re:OpenOffice needs data analysis...

[brendan_orr]

check out Scientific Applications for Linux It is sure to have something you are looking for (plus more)