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EU Publishes Open Source Migration Guidelines
Skunil writes "The IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines provide practical and detailed recommendations on how to migrate to Open Source Software (OSS)-based office applications, calendaring, e-mail and other standard applications. These guidelines have been designed to help public administrators decide whether a migration to OSS should be undertaken and describe, in broad technical terms, how such a migration could be carried out. They are based on practical experience of a limited number of publicly available case studies, and cover a wide range of management and technical concerns."
Just checked it, seems to work fine.
Other links in the pdf -
1. The OSS Fact Sheet
2. The Report on OSS usage
3. The Report on market structure and issues related to public procurement
All three of the above documents can be found here in other formats as well as PDF.
-B
SQLite is an open source (even public domain!) personal SQL-capable database. It lacks some features (like types other than strings and some SQL commands), but it's very useful for embedded databases.
Unless I misread the FreeBSD license it only stipulates three things: 1) this software is freely distributable and you can do what you want with it, 2) you can't remove any copyright notices or the like and 3) no one is responsible for the code. Freer even thant the GPL.
Peter M. Dodge,
Chief Executive Officer,
LiquidFire Studios
Platinum Linux - www.
Openoffice 1.1 has a rudimentary DB interface. It needs work, but a graphical query design (similar to access's) is there already. The backend can be any odbc or jdbc database, as far as I can tell.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Not me, amigo, but as a consultant, I can't count on my two hands the number of times I've had to either warehouse data from, or (worse) interface with an existing Access database.
Funny, when I was in college, I was told over and over again that MS Access was a solution to be touted to customers. While we were taught Oracle, Access was great for small businesses and non-profit organizations.
Now that I know better not to use Access, I can think of a bunch of alternatives that I would rather use. Access is not a multi-user-friendly system.
The Problem seems to be that it doesn't transfer the values from the summary sheet to the other. So in sheet 'Migration' they still use the 4000 user value, so training costs are a bit higher.
While on the face of it the report looks good, deeper reading reveals some serious flaws, besides the fact that the spreadsheet is in XLS format.
First of all, the report is factually incorrect in several areas. Netproject list the City of Turku as a case study, but the City of Turku turned out to be a turkey - they only used OSS as a driver for microsoft to lower rices, which they did, and Turku is now a well publicised MS case study. Not very clever to use that as advertisement for an OSS migration. The one thing PA officials do is check out case studies. It get numerous facts wrong about some of the software packages, and on the whole looks more like parroting of populist stances (exim is better and faster then postfix, for example) then real-life testing. At the very least, they should back these type of statements up with facts.
Secondly, this is so full of OSS politics, it is not even funny anymore. Take for example this little gem: "Of the session managers KDE's is the more mature but Gnome is catching up fast. Gnome is being supported by Sun Microsystems and members of the Gnome Foundation. netproject considers that it has a better architecture and believes it has a better future.". That initself should be the subject of a fine little flamewar..... Also, there are, again, no facts to support the supposition of a "better" architecture. Also, SUSE, for example, get very little to no airtime in the document, and the document is simply wrong about some of the issues discussed around SUSE. for example, the YAST discussion is plain wrong, and some highly popular prducst, such as openexchange, get no mention whatsoever. Granted, some components of SLOX are closed source, but that doesn't stop the authors from mentioning and even recommending other closed source products.
Finally, and perhaps the worst flaw of all, is the fact that despite its size, it is simply a (badly researched) list of products. This is not a HOWTO migrate, this is a list of "if you migrate, use these tools". There is no methodology, no method, not *system* to migrate. This is organisational masturbation, a big "look how l33t we are" kind of thing.
I can spend some more time ranting about this, but will be to no avail. It is published, and undoubtedly, many fools will brandish this as the final word in ridding the world of the closed source software scourge. To all our detriment......
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.