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

Metric and Imperial

[AnimeFreak]

It would be funny if the rest of world used Linux while the United States uses Windows. It would be just like the current state of measurement in this world, where the United States uses imperial and the rest of the world uses metric.

MS: Our software dies. Linux: Have it your way!

[Futurepower(R)]

Microsoft has adopted an extremely powerful public relations method, but it is a self-destructive one: Microsoft has declared that its software dies, regardless of how many users it has.

Linux, in contrast, offers software that lives forever, if an organization wants to support it. This makes a big difference to large organizations. There are many, many situations where a 350 MHz Pentium I computer running some data entry system is just fine, especially when it has been completely debugged and is giving no trouble.

When Microsoft enforces software death, those organizations must disturb something that is working well. As you can imagine, they are extremely reluctant to do so. The issue is often not money. The issue is often management capability. There is plenty of work to do without disturbing something that is working well.

From the IT World article:

"The cost of licensing Microsoft products and the lack of support for some of them, such as the NT operating system, which is still used widely in many city administrations, are among the chief reasons for the nine German cities to mull a switch from the U.S. software giant to providers of open-source products, he said." [My emphasis, of course.]

Not only do Microsoft's products regularly die, but Microsoft has a schedule of assisted suicide: Windows Desktop Product Life Cycle Support and Availability Policies for Businesses. Bill Gates has become the Dr. Jack Kevorkian of software. Mr. Gates has, for example, decreed the death of Windows 98, which is used by at least 50,000,000 people throughout the world.

Re:Microsoft can't win by cutting prices

[tulare]

So true, so true. Where I work, it's possible to buy M$ Office for $41.40 a seat. Now tell me they aren't overcharging everyone else.

In other news...

[ChrisK077]

... Microsoft has recently added BMW boss Helmut Panke to its board of directors [1] - a move to get more insight into the German political system?

And a German Member of Parliament, Ekin Deligoz, recently said (on TV) that she thought it was frightening "if you think about how much money Microsoft invests into their parliament work". [2]

Both links in German language only, unfortunately:
[1] Heise
[2] 3sat

German schools

[bazik]

I really hope this movement will change the opinions of most teachers here.

In our schools here in Germany, they teach you the
'work' with Windows as it is the industry standard and got no alternatives.

At least at our school we got one teacher who really is pro-linux. He uses Debian, doesnt like Microsoft, is happy about the current movement and teaches the histroy of Linux, installation of Debian and configuration/installation of various services.

And beleive me, thats thousand times more interesting than clicking through a Windows application installer...

Germ's goin' Linux

[jskline]

This is probably only the tip of the iceburg. Apparently if you haven't yet seen Micro$oft's EULA's that they now include in all their updates, you have missed the boat off this island.

They now are installing software to "check your license validity" with all the updates, and you have to agree to this in order to install and use the updates.

I happened to paruse the EULA's with Directx 9 and Media Player 9, and both of them contain these requirements that you click through and allow them to spy on you, and what you have in your computer. On one machine, I allowed it and had Sygate installed to catch stuff, and sure enough, some stuff was trying to get out to the internet as soon as stuff was finished loading. I didn't have time or a way of looking at the packets, and what DLL's were doing it but suffice to say my suspicions were raised when the machine starts up and takes an unusual amount of time to boot, and my HD light was on for a really long time.

Talk about the "New World Order" or what???!!!!!!!! Bastards.

I'm very closely scrutinizing my Laptop since it has Windows XP Pro on it, and already discovered NOT to trust the Microsoft firewall that comes with XP!!! Apparently they might be caught with the pants down if you have Sygate, or ZD's firewalls, and if people are actually willing to try them also.

I have to try the new browsers soon as I'm going back to experimenting with Linux and BeOS (rogue versions and my legit Pro 5 ed).

Cheers;
Jeff