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."

Comments

Re:Thats bloody beautiful

[zappepcs]

Can we get a special tag for this. I mean it's getting to where this type of headline is more abundant than anything needing the suddenoutbreakofcommonsense tag. Perhaps that is the tag that needs to be applied? Well, maybe not. We could at least start tagging them with OSSWindowsSmackDownScore or something, right?

I don't know who is keeping score between Windows and F/OSS anymore, but it seems like newsworthy events when entire government branches, or governments, or countries smack down Windows in favor of F/OSS. Funny, I've not heard any stories that amount to "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" after any of these announcements. Does anyone know of such a story where switching caused great harm or fiscal problems?

Re:so..

[Keruo]

Self-updating is not problem, apt-cron etc will handle that.

The problem is, I have new software which I need to deploy to 4000 machines overnight.
Do I really have to reimage 4000 machines to achieve that goal?
What about user files on those desktop machines? Reimaging would wipe them clear. (ok, home directory on separate partition/on network would fix this)

Having something automatically installed/uninstalled on machines centrally deployed is the problem here.