Toy Penguins and Male Egos Drove Linux Acceptance

An anonymous reader writes "Germany's local and city councils have been pioneering the migration from Windows to Linux. Now, one of the IT staff behind one move has revealed how they persuaded workers to accept the changes. Stuffed toy penguins and Linux t-shirts helped to create an open-source love-in at the council offices, and they got a senior chairwoman to demonstrate the new system to the troops. Male ego stopped anyone claiming that Linux was difficult to use, once they'd seen that the 'weaker sex' could master it :)"

Comments

Re:Which one?

[maulwurf]

according to ct-magazine they are using SuSE-Linux. german article: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/34859

Re:"the 'weaker' sex?"

[wrp103]

To be fair, the 'weaker sex' comment isn't from the article, but from the /. blurb. In fact, the article uses the term "powerful women".

The article does, however, mention male ego after having seen a woman use the system.

Part of bigger move to Open Source in German Govt

[blorg]

SuSE is a logical choice given that it's a German company but this is part of a much larger move towards Open Source by the German government, which has been going on for some time now. They did a deal with IBM to let agencies buy IBM hardware and SuSE software at discounts competitive with MS. They are doing this, according to the Interior Minister, because "We raise the level of IT security by avoiding monocultures, we lower the dependency on single software vendors, and we reach costs savings in software and operation costs."

The difference with MS is that while using SuSE, due to the nature of Open Source they are not tied to and reliant on a single vendor. This is just the latest town to so convert, albeit with interesting staff-persuasion tactics!

Re:The Holy Roman Catholic Church

[Scrameustache]

The idea of women being the 'weaker sex' is a product of the 1000+ year old war on pagan goddess worship waged by the Catholic Church.

Well, well, trolling against a religious group I see... I'm not in the habit of defending organised religion, but you're making my bullshit radar go off the chart.

Women in ancient times were revered as sacred vessels of fertility. Constantine, later rulers and the Catholic Popes did their best to destroy the idea of goddess worship and make the women a secondary being, which was a major factor in shaping our society today.

Yeah, next you're gonna claim that women had the right to vote in Athens huh?

First of all, Judaism started a pogrom against godess worship 3 thousand years before that.

Secondly, women have been considered the weaker sex in china and japan for aeons too, where they hadn't even heard of the Catholic church. Women in china and japan were forbidden from learning to write, so they had to make up their own "women's language". Hiragana and Katakana in japan, and I forget the name of the chineese one.
What, did the catholic church pray for the heatens to embrace that woman-bellitteling you pretend they invented?

And finally, the reason women are considered the weaker sex is because they are weaker. Is the roman catholic church also responsible for secretly weakening female olympians so that they would systematically achive lower performances than that of the mens? What secret roman catholic magic powers did they use to accomplish that? The gap has been shortening in recent decades thanks to illicit drugs and homone treatments (see the east-germany women's olympic swimming team from 1976 and 1980...scary!), but women still lift less, swim and run slower, etc.

Jeez, using anti-sexism to spread racism...that's something.