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Munich to Go Ahead with Linux After All
Saeed al-Sahaf writes "According to Groklaw and the German publication Heise (it's in German, of course) Munich's mayor Christian Ude has held a press conference, in which he said that the bidding process for the switch from Windows to Linux will go forward as originally planned, despite patent issues. InfoWorld (in English), quotes Bernd Plank, a spokesman for Munich town hall, saying that he expected that the administration would take a maximum of 'two to three weeks' to decide whether the EU's Directive on software patents could affect the city's plan to switch to Linux, and that would be no 'dramatic setback.'" We reported this earlier as well, but now that it's making the rounds again in English, more of us can read it without resorting to Babelfish.
The more organizations deploy Linux, the lower the cost will become for further deployments. For example Munich will use VMWare while slowly porting their special Win-only software to Linux.
The next generation will do without VMWare and will lower the cost to migrate to Linux.
Oh, and I might add that 5 cities in Bavaria are also thinking in joining Munich directly.
Also, in 3-4 years, if any hardware company will want to sell hardware to Europe or Asia, it will have to provide Linux drivers which will be beneficial for ALL Linux users.
With the trouble the US has had with Europe, this very well might be political. Microsoft is a very big US company and switching from Microsoft to identityless software may improve the mood of some Europeans. This is not a unfounded belief. Korea-Japan-China initiative to develop an alternative OS was to depend less on the US software industry. The result was Red Flag Linux.