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Secret EU Open Source Migration Study Leaked
Elektroschock writes "For 4 years MEP Marco Cappato tried to get access to the EU Council's 2005 open source migration study because he is a member of a responsible IT oversight committee in the European Parliament. His repeated requests for access were denied. Now they have finally been answered because the Council's study has escaped into the wild (PDF in French and English). Here is a quick look. It is embarrassing! Gartner, when asked if there were any mature public Linux installations in Europe, claimed that there were none. Michael Silver said, 'I have not spoken to any sizable deployments of Linux on the desktop and only one or two StarOffice deployments.' Gartner spread patent and TCO FUD. Also, the European Patent Office participated in the project, although it is not an EU institution."
Gartner also made the case that EU governments should not abandon open standards, but rather redefine open standards by removing royalty free use. Thats basically tossing the success story of the Internet out the window and still using it as branding name for the new EIFv2 "European Interoperability Framework" See EU-commission pages at: http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7728 and a post about it here: http://bosson.blogspot.com/2009/05/stealing-free-from-open-standards.html
Yes there are. They have been in the news. There have been instances in the UK and France since 2006, there are many schools and educational institutions as well as companies that have made the switch. I know in the Netherlands and Belgium government agencies have been looking into it and if I'm correct a lot of the ex-Soviet countries that are now part of the EU (Hungary, Poland, ...) and the Scandinavians have less advertised but nonetheless important conversions.
Gartner is a sock puppet for Microsoft and everybody in the industry knows that (they made the analysis that Windows XP before SP1 was safer than Linux by comparing it to Red Hat Linux 5.3 (not RHEL, the original 5.3))
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80000+ desktops + 33 datacenters in Spain in 2003 ? Qualifies :) ?
Please read more than the first paragraph, especially if you link to a source yourself :) Goverment migration in Extramadura started in 2006/2007 however in 2002 they migrated 70000-80000 (the figures differ from source to source) desktops for their schools and they set up 33 public computer centers.