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. "

Comments

Is it just me?

[olego]

I read that as "Spanish Religion Goes Entirely Open Source", and spent the next few seconds wondering about the implication of this transition.

Re:Is it just me?

[Torstein Haldorsen]

I misread it the same way, and I am in the process of actually founding an "Open Source Religion". A coherent organized worldview that is dynamic, module-based and upgradable. In contrast with the thousands of years old, monolithic, static and all-to-often fundamentalist doctrines that monopolize the religious market today. I say it's about time they get some competition.

Re:gnuLinEx

[atomicstrawberry]

Based off here it looks like it's basically Debian Sarge with a set of useful applications - I assume the ones that have different names eg Zurbarán (Gimp 2.2) are localised builds.

Re:gnuLinEx

[4e617474]

From what I could find, it's mostly a localized Debian with a few tweaks for ease-of-use and some educational apps and such. Review linked by distrowatch.

Good

[Wylfing]

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!)

Simple math

[orzetto]

The government has estimated that the total cost of this project was about 190,000 euros, 18 million euros lower than if the schools had purchased Microsoft software.

Good argument for GNU, Linux and open source in general with your boss: cuts your software costs by 98.9%. Finally someone puts an official number on this.

Re:A Goal!

[kripkenstein]

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.

Re:Good now they don't have an excuse to pirate by

[davaguco]

Spain is not third world, by any account or figure.

Re:gnuLinEx

[xtracto]

Well, I can read spanish, and after reading the What's new information I found two or three quite interesting things. I will try to summarize them here:

• Primer arranque (First boot): Allows graphics booting using gfxboot, something quite nice for "normal" users, as I remember my flatmate got scared at the Ubuntu screen boot, with the list of the [OK] and [FAILED] services status (background here).
  
• Instalación (Installing): Just a graphical installer with graphical partition resizing, I saw this already when installing Ubuntu and Mandriva.
  
• Más comodidad (More confortability [is that a word?]): Just the old root/user password option with automatic login.
  
• Un Escritorio más vivo (more alive desktop),Mantente a la última (stay at the edge), El nuevo Actualizar LinEx (New LinEx Update): Some desktop backgrounds, system update and package installer. Nothing too fancy IMHO.
  
• Aptéalo con APTZILLA ("Aptate it" with APTZILLA) : This is something which I believe is worth to mention, I have never seen something simillar in any other distribution. It seems to be a Firefox extension that enables to install software from an internet page. It would be very interesting to try it because from what it seems it would be a way to achieve the "click+download+click^x+install" behaviour in Windows for the end user (my father for example wont be able to install Repast framework in Ubuntu because it is not in the repositores, whereas to install it on Windows he just have to download the installer and run it).
  
• El Panel de Control de gnuLinEx: A control panel similar to what a lot of other distributions have. HOWEVER I find quite relevant that they embed the WINE emulator (which btw I.N.an E.), I imagine they try to make as easy as possible to enable Windows applications to run in Linux. That is the other property worth to note, as I have not seen any distribution that gives so much importance to it (well, besides the commecial distros like xandros, lindows [ya ya I like to call it Lindows], etc).
  
• El wiki personal (The Personal Wiki [see, spanish is not that hard]): That is the other interesting application, which a wiki like note taker (the application seems to be Tomboy.
  

Well, all the other properties I did not listed are the ones that I have seen in other distributions.