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.

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.