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Spanish Region Goes Entirely Open Source

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the build-it-and-they-will-come dept.

greengrass writes to tell us TechWorld is reporting that the Spanish region of Extremadura has decided to go completely open source with their day-to-day operations. While the region has long been a supporter of open source software, within a year it will be a requirement that all officials use the ODF and PDF formats for all documents. From the article: "Extremadura, Spain's poorest region, made headlines following a 2002 decision to migrate about 70,000 desktops and 400 servers in its schools to a locally tailored version of Debian called gnuLinEx. The government has estimated that the total cost of this project was about 190,000 euros (£130,000), 18 million euros lower than if the schools had purchased Microsoft software. "

2 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Good by Wylfing · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Good. Now if only my local government would listen to me and stop wasting millions of dollars on MS licenses. (Their "compatibility" issue boils down to being compatible with the printer -- they always print out their stuff on letterhead and mail it through the post!)

    --
    Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
  2. Re:A Goal! by kripkenstein · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is what Opensource should be using its power to do. Good work every one!

    Yes. A few detailed points:

    1. When you have tens of thousands of desktops, the money saved by not paying Microsoft is so great, that you can even afford to pay people to code a few specific things you need (regional customization, etc.). This is the beauty of the open source stack - you get 99% of the code FOR FREE; salaries for a few good programmers to code the last 1% is cheaper than 70,000 MS licenses. Now, I don't know if the region of Extremadura pay the salaries of the LinEx people; but my point is that even if they did, it would be a huge savings.

    2. That last 1% of code may be GPL (in case it's integrated into the system and not completely standalone, or, even if it is standalone, a government or nonprofit might free the source code anyhow). So others will also be able to benefit from it.

    Back to the article itself, this latest news is very good, and may be another sign of slowly-building momentum for the Open Source movement.