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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?
With so much stuff running remotely through web interfaces, operating systems matter very little.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Take as many as you need, they're free.
Reminds me of what the trainers at work said.
Sit a linux admin and a windows admin in a room together and tell them to walk away from their mail exchangers for 2 weeks. The linux admin will be indifferent and the windows admin will visibly twitch, snap, and kill everyone.
Oh the stability of windows products.
O.o
That's a nice, well used, and wrong chestnut.
Incredibly, the only real data to back up such flimsy assertions comes from companies that have, by amazing coincidence, received money from Microsoft. Purely for something unrelated, naturally.
The fact is that Linux is considerably more flexible to configure and deploy than Windows. It also does not come with huge complexity of auditing license compliance (yes, there are some companies that offer Linux support license; no, they are not like Microsoft's licensing complex). So if you are a lone administrator using your home computer or keeping up a small office, Microsoft may come easier to you (largely because that's what you've used growing up). Once you get to something larger, all these handwaving assertions start to break down.
It is a very convenient propaganda tool, because intuitively many people can agree with it, based on their own experience of working on their own computers. So people don't question it as much as they should.
Well the 'FACT' is due to M$ greed and their upgrade policy, windows and office support costs a packet, each and every forced upgrade cycle. Windows can and often is a nightmare to support, auto upgrade has to be disabled just in case and then manually done. Document incompatibilities in between versions needs constant support. Reality is, due to the simplicity of administering a Linux system (the windows registry sucks dead dog's dicks, why, why, oh why the fuck why) with text file configuration, a competent Linux administrator can get a huge amount done in a very short time, pay twice as much to often get ten times the work done in the same time.
PS you pay more for better skilled people, so what you are really saying is that Linux trained system administrators are better skilled then windoze admins (having contracted out both I can guarantee on average that is true). In fact often those Linux admins are far better at administrating windows systems then your typical windoze admin.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
One way of looking at this is that governments would be insourcing, rather than outsourcing, their OS needs. You are right - on the Linux side, support does cost money. On the Windows side, ultimate obsolescence and upgrades are what would cost money. Since these computers wouldn't be used to play professional games (just the simple ones like Mines, Network and so on), the hardware can be as old as it likes (as long as it's still reliable) and since the governments would now be rolling their own distros, as did Munich or Portugal,
The hard lesson came to these guys w/ XP - they can either continue running an unsupported OS (in terms of bug fixes, antivirus & so on) or they can cough up €€€ in upgrading to Windows 7 (might as well go directly to Windows 8 if they are doing it NOW, and add whatever utilities they need to get back the start menu). Or they could bite the bullet this one time, switch to Linux (where they'd have the option of rolling out their own distro), and then maintaining a software division to write whatever apps they need, particularly ones in their native languages. Even the last sounds like good news for governments, since everywhere, governments like to expand and have more things to keep them busy, and ergo, more jobs for their voters. I just see win-win-win-win-win in all of this.
I used to work for a state government agency -- more than ten years ago. Anyway, I was given a computer to use, a login for various things, MS Office to type stuff on, and I was completely forbidden to install anything. I suspect for large entities, including governments, ease of application installation isn't really an issue because the users aren't going to be doing the installing.
Anyway, I left the state and opened up my own business. At first I made copious use of open source because every penny mattered, and then later just because it was familiar to me and worked fine. I can say that for basic word processing and spreadsheet work -- like what 99.999% of what anyone actually does, Open/Libre Office has been just fine over the years (daily frequent usage). In fact, I don't even know how to use most of what LibreOffice offers because in reality, it doesn't matter -- I'm not a book or magazine publisher. I just need to write letters, envelopes, and certain industry specific atypically formatted documents, but nothing a background image, center, bold and italic can't handle.
Recently I had to install windows (7, in a VM) for a special project and I had no choice about this. This is the first version of Windows I've had in a decade (I'm a Linux and OS X user), and you know what, at first it was fucking hard to use. Not because it's actually hard ... but because it was unfamiliar. Except, after a few hours or so with it, it sort of clicked and it's as easy as anything else. Just like in my office -- the assistants all use OS X machines, and every new employee goes through a little reorientation with the computer if they aren't OS X familiar, but after a few days, nobody notices (except the total idiots, but it's a good test because it has been well proven to me, that if you can't translate the task from one icon to another, you probably belong in a job where you can listen to music all day and make coffee). Anyway, after a few days, they just use it and do their work without difficulty. I suspect that most people will be able to do the same thing, especially if the IT guy is the one doing all the installation and then telling them "to do that, just click on this icon right here ..."
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
No, in the instances companies and organisations switched from Windows to Linux the support cost went _down_ not up. There's plenty of good reasons for that, like the ability to not only remotely log into such machines, but also the ability to script that. Or the idea of a package manager where you can do updates of _all_ your software automatically. Or the idea that all configuration is stored in text files which are trivial to edit and fix if something goes wrong.
One if the more extreme examples is currently seen. Microsoft dropped support for Windows XP... without providing a successor. Now many companies are faced with switching to Windows 7 only to be faced with the same problem in a few years. If Windows XP would have been free (as in speech) software, they could have just gradually replaced parts of it with newer versions, making the change gradual instead of abrupt, maybe even keeping some parts for compatibility.
Free Software isn't dependent on single organisations or persons. Just look at Ubuntu. If you don't like Unity, switch to Xubuntu or Kubuntu. If you don't like Shuttleworth switch to Debian. You'll have (more or less) the same software on all of those, but you have a choice.
This is old news - in these pages itself, the first time they started on it was 2006 [slashdot.org], and last year, too, there was another story [slashdot.org] 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.
Except the current Portuguese government decided to start replacing some of the machines running GNU/Linux with Windows. There were even some problems in the transition of the government website infrastructure, because the new Microsoft solution could not serve as much client requests as the previous Linux-based one, leading to a massive downtime which lasted weeks [1].
I don't want to speculate but most probably the new team assigned to manage the government website did only have knowledge on Microsoft technologies, so the old previous system had to go.... This is a shame because they did it during an Economical crisis, wasting money on Windows server license keys and all other associated costs which they did not have before (since it was already running Linux).
[1] http://exameinformatica.sapo.pt/web/exameinformatica/noticias/internet/2012-04-04-sistema-de-redundancia-do-portal-do-governo-nao-funcionou;jsessionid=7AE120CAF45F6309EC0DB51D0D8E70D5
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?