Slashdot Mirror
Spanish Extremadura Moving 40,000 Desktops To Linux
jrepin writes with this quote from a post at the European Commission's JoinUp site:
"The administration of Spain's autonomous region of Extremadura is moving to a complete open source desktop, replacing the current proprietary desktop platform, confirms the region's CIO, Teodomiro Cayetano López. The IT department started a project to install the Debian distribution on all 40,000 desktop PCs. 'The project is really advanced and we hope to start the deployment the next spring, finishing it in December.' The project makes it Europe's second largest open source desktop migration, between the French Gendarmerie (90,000 desktops) and the German city of Munich (14,000 desktops)."
While it is a pity that Europe is sliding into socio-economic oblivion, it's a great chance for Linux. Never waste a crisis!
They have hosted codesprints and Debconf 2009. So this is really just a continuation of a long time of moving towards Linux. But I do not like the part where he says "Our budget for this is zero euros", that will not go well.
Nobody expects the Spanish Extremadura!
"And of course, it needs to be free. Because our budget for this plan is of zero euros."
Yep.
Can't see this blowing up in anyones face. (See: the ongoing ordeal and budget overruns of the Munich conversion)
Um, last time I checked (which was a couple of weeks ago) the Munich project was going extremely well.
Pirate Party UK
Don't be an idiot, Extremadura developed and deployed Linex, massively deployed in every single public (high)school in Extremadura; they know how to do it and what it costs.
OK, so I understand from other posts that Extremadura has historically done a good job of supporting Linux. Whatever. I still can't shake the feeling - particularly given past experience with other big migration projects - that this is a ploy to get a better price from Microsoft.
Finally! Just in time for the end of the world, too.
I wonder if, in the future, having to buy hardware that is "designed for Linux", and is therefore in a market aside from the one of mainstream desktop PCs, could reduce the economic advantage of such operations.
Please allow me to make a few clarifications on the subject, because there are some additional facts related than can be missed if you didn't read TFA and TF(Spanish Newspaper)A linked by TFA:
It's been nine years and more money than budgeted and they've converted 65% of the computers. The idea of converting to Linux is still so strange and uncommon that an autonomous region of Spain considering the same move nine years later is Slashdot-worthy news. It sounds to me like a huge failure.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
They created LinEx and migrated back then. Now they're migrating back to Debian as they end development of LinEx.
I don't know what the automated translation looks like, but I can tell you that
a) LinEx was not a "ridiculous incest", it made sense big time and also was more than just the distro, they put a free-software-based-PC every two under-13 school kids, they put the same PCs in every public library in the region ("Nuevos Centros del Conocimiento", New Knowledge Centers), they created elder-persons computer-literacy programs and more...
b) how can they "suck in public money" if they were the very public administration? They stopped giving away public money to (US) private companies, and created a public entrerprise to create a public-interest, publicly-available, free-as-in-beer-and-also-as-in-speech region-wide computer network with public access to the internet.
oh don't be such a party pooper.
The GP has a point. The Linux desktop went nowhere. 40K desktops in Spain, 14K in Munich and 90K by the French police are by themselves respectable numbers. But when you take the perspective that:
one needs to reckon that, yes, we may all use Linux at home and some even at work (I do) but the Linux desktop never made it anywhere close mass market presence.
If I want to buy a high-quality laptop withOUT paying for an OS license that I am not going to use, the situation is as dire today as it was 10 years ago.
Not in Europe, but The Worlds Largest Linux Desktop Deployment: 500,000 Seats and Counting in Brazil should count for something.
It's been nine years and more money than budgeted and they've converted 65% of the computers.
On the bright side: they have migrated 100% of systems to Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, and ODF.
more money than budgeted
Yes, but this would almost certainly have also been the case if they were migrating all their systems to a more recent release of Windows. They were running enterprise wide NT4. The comparison point should not be against the pre-existing TCO, but against the alternative cost of migrating to a more recent Windows. "We do not have a goal to compare total cost of ownership. Microsoft stopped supporting NT 4.0, so we must migrate." limux project leader. How much do you think a government migration of 15,000 NT4 desktops, plus Office and other software to a recent release of Windows would cost? Due to increased hardware requirements of new Windows, such a migration would also certainly require new PCs, which would further increase costs. Maybe the cost of migration would be the same, less, or more, but in the long term freeing themselves of costly vendor lock-in and the Microsoft upgrade treadmill should result in substantial cost savings
The Linux desktop went nowhere. 40K desktops in Spain, 14K in Munich and 90K by the French police are by themselves respectable numbers.
By that logic, the Apple desktop also "went nowhere", since there were no mass migrations of government departments to Apple computers. Or maybe there is another explanation? Maybe governments are very conservative in their IT procurement, and by default choose Microsoft, often without even bothering to consider other options? For obvious reasons, it is difficult to estimate the exact number of Linux desktop users, but according to Microsoft, Linux has a greater desktop share than the Mac. Here's are some interesting comments from a report from 2010: Debunking the 1% Myth
If we do the math we find that due to netbooks alone Linux captured nearly 6% of the desktop market in 2009. In order to reach a total number we need to add larger laptops and desktops both from companies like Dell, HP (their business line) as well as smaller boutique vendors.
Additional confirmation of the growth in Linux desktop market share last year came from an unlikely source: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Using a slide to visualize OS market share Ballmer had Linux desktop market share as a slightly larger slice of the pie than MacOS. Nobody considers Apple insignificant on the desktop and neither is Linux. Here is, in part, what Mr. Ballmer had to say about Linux on the desktop and the competition for Windows:
Linux, you could see on the slide, and Apple has certainly increased its share somewhat.
[...]
I think depending on how you look at it, Apple has probably increased its market share over the last year or so by a point or more. And a point of market share on a number that's about 300 million is interesting. It's an interesting amount of market share, while not necessarily being as dramatic as people would think, but we're very focused in on both Apple as a competitor, and Linux as a competitor."
Does anyone believe that Microsoft would see Linux as a serious competitor is Linux had captured just 1% of the market? That doesn't seem very likely, does it? All the figures I have quoted so far represent sales of systems preloaded with a given operating system: Windows, MacOS or Linux. They do not represent actual usage. If you go down to the local brick and mortar computer shop or big box retailer, buy a system with Windows, wipe the hard drive and install Linux that still counts as a Windows system, not a Linux system.