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Spanish Region Goes Entirely Open Source
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. "
Good now they don't have an excuse to pirate by law. You'd think Spain would have become a world power, what with its history of killing everyone they contacted, but nope, third world.
The truth is that apart from a small number of techies nobody uses Linux in the Junta of Extremadura. It has only been installed on the batch of computers sent to schools and colleges, which the pupils hate, btw. So in many schools they have been cleaned and reinstalled with pirated copies of M$-Winblows.
As a public servant in the Junta I can tell you that this place is a monoculture of Microsoft products, pirated Microsoft products to tell it pecisely. The tests to be a public servant still include practical exercises on MS Word and Excel and there are only a couple of questions about Linux on every test, like "What is Debian?" and the like.
The truth is that the Junta uses the OSS community to get media atention and keep the BSA's people out of their offices.
As an Extremadurian tax payer and OSS developer this just disgust me.