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Spain's Extremadura Starts Move To GNU/Linux, Open Source
jrepin writes "The government of Spain's autonomous region of Extremadura has begun the switch to open source of it desktop PCs. The government expects the majority of its 40,000 PCs to be migrated this year, the region's CIO Theodomir Cayetano announced on 18 April. Extremadura estimates that the move to open source will help save 30 million euro per year. Extremadura in 2012 completed the inventory of all the software applications and computers used by its civil servants. It also tailored a Linux distribution, Sysgobex, to meet the majority of requirements of government tasks. It has already migrated to open source some 150 PCs at several ministries, including those for Development, Culture and Employment."
...to realize the obvious
Thats nice I still don't understand why my tax's are spent on OS license only for the users to login to web applications
Linux supports kerberos so authentication is not a problem its down to choices and management
what would be interesting would be what applications they need to run... is there a list somewhere ?
regards
John Jones
... Ballmer: he stopped putting money into getting the facts campaigns. Without them, how else can an autonomous region survive?
In terms of person hours, the cost of a Windows and Office license is such that if an IT support person needs to spend more than a couple of hours directly supporting a Linux machine over its lifetime than they would supporting an equivalent Windows/Office machine, the organization is spending more rather than less money. And people who can competently support Linux aren't cheap - they are certainly more expensive on a $ per hour basis than the stream of Windows support people that Microsoft created a whole division called Microsoft Learning for to ensure that supply exceeds demand. Until competent Linux desktop support people are as cheap as competent Microsoft desktop people, it's going to be hard to overcome the fact that while the OS may not cost a dollar to license, computers require support and support costs $. (And given the whole OSS financial model is to make the $ on the support end ... )
With so much stuff running remotely through web interfaces, operating systems matter very little.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The Windows 7 GUI feels more polished, especially in the area of app installation. Excel is much nicer than Open Office Calc, and I haven't even tried OO's word processor yet. But Linux has a fantastic shell and command line (mostly inherited from Unix of course), incomparably better than Windows cmd. Thunderbird is as good as Outlook, and I use Firefox on both OS's. Gnome gedit is better than Notepad/Wordpad.
Yeah, I think it's doable to shift an enterprise workforce en masse from Windows to Linux desktop. Just be prepared for some gripes about OpenOffice (or Libre) from committed MS Office users.
In my local car dealership, when you wait for your car, there's a touch PC running Windows 8 for you to surf while you wait. On IE there is a toolbar search, and there's no way to switch focus to the URL because it barely registers touch and seems to think you're dragging the title bar.
I found it completely unusable.
IMHO, the best reason to switch away from Windows is surely Windows 8?!
The sheer cost of all the apps that need replacing, and training to get the damn thing to work, is crippling. The lost productivity from that POS is more than enough to force a switch.
I thinks very good move by govenrment which will help not just cutting the cost also to boost open source world.
Rose
http://www.gizmeon.com
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/12/01/24/0416236/spanish-extremadura-moving-40000-desktops-to-linux
" 'The project is really advanced and we hope to start the deployment the next spring, finishing it in December.' "
Now, is the time of "next spring", so they started :-)
This is old news - in these pages itself, the first time they started on it was 2006, and last year, too, there was another story on their experiment here. Extremadura, Munich and Portugal happen to be pretty unique/ahead in this regard - do a search on their stories over this experiment. As long as they are doing it for long term independence from software vendors, they're on the right track - as opposed to doing it due to their 'zero budgets', since they've obviously not factored in costs of training and other things.
At this rate though, we'll probably have a gazillion more Linux distro - one for every government - local, regional or national - worldwide, that will need maintenance. Let's see how far that goes. Maybe the EU, that supergovernment that's an expert in everything, or the UN, could come up w/ their own distro, if they haven't yet?
I thought we were post-PC! Where are the tablets that are supposedly taking over the world?
Yes, but then again, once you have things settled and working properly, you rarely ever need support. Unlike some other proprietary OSes, where things are constantly breaking, a Linux machine always works unless the hardware fails.
I have lived such a transition. Before, Windows machines would break all the time, and people in support were always overwhelmed. Now with Linux in desktops, after a small period of shock from users because of the change, its boring and very rarely support is ever needed. People also tend to stick to their work, since they can no longer try/install random malware of the day.
You are also forgetting, support for free software can come from anywhere; you are not tied to a single vendor. And i mean real support, such as, "i need program x to do y, can you change it?"
Chaining yourself to a single vendor is business suicide; and a loss of sovereignty to a foreign corporation from a government perspective.
Once you break of the chains, you will never want to go back.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Except that for governments, that budget would be even more than the Windows budgets, and it would lock governments to one source - Apple. Better idea here - PC-BSD. Just find some way of running OS-X apps, in addition to the usual KDE apps. PC-BSD is now a lot more polished, and so once they come up w/ configurations that don't have missing drivers on FBSD, PC-BSD can run on them just fine. Only thing - there's not much proliferation of distros there like there is in Linux.
Yet another Linux distro.
Ahhh, pushed a wrong moderation button. Need to post to undo it.
http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?fhfilter=extremadura
At what point in history did the commercial software to run a PC start costing 3-5 times the cost of the physical PC?
.. where the software is too expensive, the interface is busted and the stability is screwed .. Ubuntu launched Unity! That shit is seriously going to take over the world man. Every man and his dog is going to be using a tablet with Unity on it! And telephones too, there's nothing more satisfying than taking a swipe at your telephone .. trust me, I've seen the shiny videos with "it's so pretty" reviews on cnet!
And just at the right point
But in all seriousness, what sort of desktop distro could a western government safely choose now? It's almost 2 choices:
1/ Roll your own
2/ Use Redhat
Choice 1 is okay for smaller governments, but choice 2 is the only realistic option for larger governments.
A user needs no source code afterall.
Here's how I explain it to people: "Free software" comes with the blueprints so that you can hire anyone you want to make improvements.
A movement to Windows8 will be far more painful than a move to Linux, because new hardware will be needed not that Win8 wont run on the old CPU, but ya cant get no device drivers!!!!
Windows 8 uses the same driver model as Windows Vista. If a piece of PC hardware was made in the past six years, it has more than likely has Vista drivers. Or are you referring to pre-2007 hardware with only XP drivers?
Using this argument without facts to back up why one solution costs more than the other can indeed be wrong. However, by itself it applies just fine. I've seen situations where an organization had 400 windows desktop computers and 200 Linux workstations. Both were used by end users, both had no admin rights for those end users. about 150 of the 200 Linux boxes were used by users that also had a windows machine. About 50 Linux machines were used as the only desk top computer. This implies that all critical systems like time management, e-mail, word processing and such were perfectly doable on the Linux machines. The entire windows support team, including servers, was about 30 FTE. The entire UNIX team had 2.5 FTE working on desktop support and about 10FTE working on servers (several hundred of them, several different OSes, doing 24/7 HA stuff). In this situation, the efficiency of the UNIX team was much bigger than that of the windows team. Given the fact that both had licenses on the desktop machines and the linux machines had significantly faster and more expensive hardware, in the end, the cost of both systems per desk top was more or less equivalent. In the end, the finance picture is much more complicated than just looking at support or license costs. In the end you select which system gets things done and is future proof for the most competitive price. Sometimes that is windows, sometimes it's not.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
And just at the right point .. where the software is too expensive, the interface is busted and the stability is screwed .. Ubuntu launched Unity!
Unity can be fixed: sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
Extremadura has started the move several years ago... TFA is no-news.
Just a quick search suggests that SysGobEx is actually the strategic plan to implement opensource in government. Extremadura actually had sponsored a linux distro called Linex (still being maintained as per distrowatch) back in the early 2000s. I think the headline submission text needs a revision.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)
Is this the same Extremadura that 10 years ago said the same thing? And the one that two years ago acknowledged only 10% progress in servers and 5% on desktops? And that dropped the full-scale migration? Or is it the one that, today, said they are paying $2.8M to M$? http://www.hoy.es/20130430/local/windows-utiliza-junta-ilegal-201304301225.html
If I'm a widget manufacturer, I probably don't care as long as the software is supported somehow.
With free software, you can still buy support even after the original publisher has discontinued support.
Actually, the deal w/ TiVo was that they locked down the flash memory device that stored the code, even though it was published as per the GPLv2. Issue that RMS had was that Freedom 3 of GNU - the 'right' to improve the program i.e. change it, was prevented by TiVo as a result, even though the GPL itself was not violated. TiVo had a good reason to do that - had they left it open, anyone could have re-coded it so that the output went not just to the TV screen, but also to, say, an mp4 or a divx file, which could then be downloaded on one's computer and finally find its way into YouTube and other sites. Such a move would have made TiVo run afoul of content providers, and pretty much ended their participation in the deal that got TiVo its success.
Linus, unlike Stallman, is not anti-business, and therefore doesn't have a problem when businesses do what they have to while using Linux to ensure their success. He was pretty happy for TiVo, and has in recent years pretty much distanced himself from the FSF due to their more shrill posturing. Also, RMS treats anything that goes on a ROM as a circuit, and the GNU principles don't apply there. In other words, had TiVo put their stuff on a mask ROM and shipped it, he wouldn't have had a problem, even though the effect would have been almost the same. TiVo uses flash so that in the event that they do need to do a firmware upgrade for any reason, they can. Again, the reason they don't allow their customers to do it are many fold, but the biggest one is that they would run afoul of the content providers if they did.
Stallman's printer problem is solved by the GPL, but that would have happened even if the GPL didn't have the copyleft clause in it. The copyleft clause is what kills it for a lot of businesses. It costs money for someone to write the software - money that can't be recouped if the first wave of customers just give it away to anyone who asks under the 'help your neighbor' ideal. As has been rehashed here many times, that works for some situations, but not most, and by taking away the ability to practically recoup one's total expenses, the GPL makes itself amongst the least business friendly of licenses.
The greatest thing about Exchange + Outlook was the ability to recall a mail that had been mistakenly sent, but not read by the recipient. Something I wish for, but have never seen in Sendmail. Anyone knows whether any FOSS mail service has it - for either Linux, BSD or Windows?
No way does anybody in their right mind actually believe that anyone going to contract a developer to build drivers for components in their decade old PC.
I was referring to external peripherals such as an EPROM programmer or an expensive CNC mill.
I use Ubuntu in a Windows shop and am much happier. Laptop zips along quite nicely, I have access to tons of neat software in the repository, and most apps today have a browser interface anyhow (goodbye Outlook, Lync, and MS Office installs). If I happen to need Windows, I can load it up on VMware player (doesn't come up often, though).