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German Foreign Ministry Migrates Desktops To OSS
ruphus13 writes "Here's another example of 'German Engineering' — The Foreign Ministry in Germany is migrating all of its 11,000 desktops to GNU/Linux and other open source applications. According to the article, 'this has drastically reduced maintenance costs in comparison with other ministries. "The Foreign Ministry is running desktops in many far away and some very difficult locations. Yet we spend only one thousand euro per desktop per year. That is far lower than other ministries, that on average spend more than 3000 euro per desktop per year ... Open Source desktops are far cheaper to maintain than proprietary desktop configurations," says Rolf Schuster, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Madrid and the former head of IT at the Foreign Ministry ... "The embassies in Japan and Korea have completely switched over, the embassy in Madrid has been exclusively using GNU/Linux since October last year", Schuster added, calling the migration a success.' The Guardian has additional coverage of the move."
Dear Sir,
The chronometer in your time machine appears to be off by a few decades.
You apparently landed in the early 21st century, instead of the mid 20th.
I'm afraid a time machine repair shop won't be available for another 200 years. But hey, we have cable TV!
Just now Microsoft made a statement to the press...
"OSS is not cheaper to maintain for the following reasons"
1. Employees will waste that extra time they get not waiting for reboots instead of using it for texting & other 'social' activities.
2. We pay people to stick their fingers in their ears and say "La La LA MS is cheaper La La Laaaaa".
3. Any money left will encourage your employees to steal it.
4. Steve Balmer needs it to develop sweat-proof chairs.
5. Windows 7 wont have any of the existing lock-in as previous versions of Windows. It'll all be new kinds of lock-in.
6. ???
7. Profit (for us not you)
I don't think laptops existed when this story was new.
Das Jahr des Linux Desktop-Computer.
This space up for sale.
They're still waiting on those Gentoo desktops to compile. They'll be ready for deployment "any day now!"
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
"If you don't like it change it" is the crap that most linux fans don't get - Very few people want to write code - programming is a waste of time for most users. If I don't like it, and I see that a company is selling software that does what I need (albeit closed source), I'll go ahead and save time by buying it, rather that learn how to change the code someone else has written. I'm an electrical engineer by training, and I find programming quite a waste of my time - I always end up hiring someone else to run simulations for me, since my strength is design - not being a code monkey...