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.