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City of Barcelona Dumps Windows For Linux and Open Source Software (europa.eu)
An anonymous reader quotes Open Source Observatory:
The City of Barcelona is migrating its computer systems away from the Windows platform, reports the Spanish newspaper El País. The City's strategy is first to replace all user applications with open-source alternatives, until the underlying Windows operating system is the only proprietary software remaining. In a final step, the operating system will be replaced with Linux... According to Francesca Bria, the Commissioner of Technology and Digital Innovation at the City Council, the transition will be completed before the current administration's mandate ends in spring 2019. For starters, the Outlook mail client and Exchange Server will be replaced with Open-Xchange. In a similar fashion, Internet Explorer and Office will be replaced with Firefox and LibreOffice, respectively. The Linux distribution eventually used will probably be Ubuntu, since the City of Barcelona is already running 1,000 Ubuntu-based desktops as part of a pilot...
Barcelona is the first municipality to have joined the European campaign 'Public Money, Public Code'. This campaign is an initiative of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and revolves around an open letter advocating that publicly funded software should be free. Currently, this call to public agencies is supported by more than 100 organisations and almost 15,000 individuals. With the new open-source strategy, Barcelona's City Council aims to avoid spending large amounts of money on licence-based software and to reduce its dependence on proprietary suppliers through contracts that in some cases have been closed for decades.
Barcelona is the first municipality to have joined the European campaign 'Public Money, Public Code'. This campaign is an initiative of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and revolves around an open letter advocating that publicly funded software should be free. Currently, this call to public agencies is supported by more than 100 organisations and almost 15,000 individuals. With the new open-source strategy, Barcelona's City Council aims to avoid spending large amounts of money on licence-based software and to reduce its dependence on proprietary suppliers through contracts that in some cases have been closed for decades.
In breaking news, Microsoft has just announced that it will supply the City of Barcelona with free licences for all of its software needs.
...I can already see the inevitable Slashdot headline: The country of Barcelona dumps Ubuntu to return to Windows 10.
Maybe Barcelona and Munich could just meet up and swap all their computers!
#DeleteChrome
Spectrum (Charter / Brighthouse / Time Warner) Cable has switched to Libre Office for customer care and some other departments.
All the city's computers swich their locale settings to ca_ES.UTF-8, annoying the shit out of everybody. Then they hold a referendum to propose disconnecting from the internet and dumping their .es top-level domain name. Then the main server flees to Belgium.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Remulak may be a small town in France, but Barcelona is neither of those things.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
you might want to get a map before commenting and looking like a retard!
I propose they use Manuel. It is from Barcelona.
And if they are smart, all of their servers should be Fawlty resistant.
And to change horses in mid-stream I can say I didn't get where I am today without having servers that were Fawlty resistant.
Certainly not . . .
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
What really makes this possible is the cloud. Typically industry specific software will make it really difficult to migrate away from Windows, but as more and more of these programs migrate to a browser based interface, Linux compatibility shoots through the roof.
By going with a phased approach where the OS is the last thing to migrate, they have already demonstrated more forethought than many other organisations. The real milestones will be when they get finance to move away from excel and when they replace senior members of IT. Until they meet those milestones, this will in all likelihood end up being a giant waste of money and time.
Or at least before they switch to GNU/Linux. There is too much crappy hardware out there that just doesn't work right and trying to support it once you've migrated to a better operating system where you are expected to perform more frequent upgrades is a nightmare. Fortunately there are a few companies whom have prioritized selling only the properly supported freedom friendly hardware. I prefer ThinkPenguin.com because they've got the largest hardware selection and put there money where it counts in terms of getting code released and working on important engineering projects to get us away from the crap Intel/AMD dish out, but there are a handful of other companies that you can get at least some items from as well. See http://www.fsf.org/ryf
seems it is being driven with much of the same zealotry as the Munich one. Ultimately it will probably fail because of the very same reason. This is not to say OSS is a bad thing, it may well be the best thing for them, but that should be determined on usability, cost if ownership etc not because you want to jump on a bandwagon. All this generates is user resentment as they are dragged along for the ride and ultimately hurts more than it helps and zealotry is a really bad way to spend public funds, personally I want my local government to spend as wisely and efficiently as possible be it for OSS or closed source projects, bang for buck and meeting requirements is all that should matter.
The people you need to swear at for that are the Linux and OSS engineers that built Munich a bucket of shit rather than the shining perfect system they promised.
Patience, High Master. Our plan is working perfectly, Zontar The Mindless. The foolish earthlings do not suspect a thing. I counsel respectfully that you refrain from drawing attention to their geographical perception-impairments, for you may induce an unintentional flow of Fabaceae seeds from their implement of storage.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
well i wouln't be supprised if the engineers in munich tried and listend to the politicians :).
But Microsoft don't have a monopoly. You have plenty of alternatives to choose from. Except you don't.
....or perhaps some bribes happened behind the scene. I heard M$ had an HQ at Germany.
You sound like you're celebrating the fact many businesses and government agencies are locked in to a single source of software for a multitude of reasons. As a nerd I'd expect you to celebrate non-technical people embracing a very technical philosophy and trying to encourage other vendors to provide alternative products and avoid monopolies and all the pitfalls they bring.
I remember when this place was News for Nerds. Now it seems to be Clickbait for Trolls.
Are there any alternatives to slashdot that the trolls haven't ruined and have more than 2 visitors per day?
First they try and dump Spain for independence, now they dump Windows for Linux. Aren't they challenged enough?
These days Linux support for hardware is pretty good, and moderate diligence alleviates that risk. 15 years ago I would have agreed with you, and 10 years ago there were still some issues. In my personal experience there is now little that is not supported for the typical office environment. It's different if you are talking things like mass spectrometers, or some music hardware, but in those corner cases (which the Barcelona government might not even have) then you can buy an occasional Windows machine, although the TCO for those individual machines might be quite high. The area that might his Barcelona the most might be quality of drivers for high end graphics cards for architectural work.
Wow, I'm shocked the guy names WindowsStar is a M$ shill.
The only thing that will stop Barcelona succeeding is the exact same thing that stopped Munich...corrupt officials taking bribes from M$.
Thanks Ivan, your contribution has been recorded.
Don't forget to sign the open letter:
https://publiccode.eu/
The louder our voice is, the more the politicians will listen!
Vote this up for being the most offtopic post of the day.
So long as there isn't commercial support for all this open software that they now don't have to pay for, these transitions aren't going to work. I assume they aren't going to shift their license costs to developer costs to maintain and improve said open software. They're just going to sit back and think of all of those savings they'll be saving. Until the incompatibility stick hits them. Linux is only free if your time is free. As soon as you need to support that shit, it is just as costly if not more so than any Windows installation.
I had shrimp today for dinner! It was really good.
I once read an article on Linux on the Desktop, and the cases where it makes sense. Basically it was
... with a lower saving!
- Organisations which need very limited specialist finctionality (E.g. Point of Sale)
- Very small organisations who can make do with a few standard apps and can spend time converting formats
- Very large organisations that can have whole departments to customise apps (leverage open source) change formats of incoming documents, give support, etc.
I would think that Barcelona would be medium sized and not benefit so much , though this could be mitigated by working with a support partner
Buy all the kit Munich is scrapping whilst moving back to Windows!
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
The way LiMux was botched is a textbook example how to screw up a software rollout with shitty management. That some stupid n00bs can rollback a deployment worth 10ns of millions of Euros is a total desaster.
I hope the city of Barcelona has the minimum requirements of basic brain functions to pull this off without to many problems and some ords screwing up the process. After the LiMux desaster we need a success in this field.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Notice every time a argument is made to switch to Linux its always about saving money. Its never that the applications are better, or that Linux is safer and more secure, or that users like it better. No the only reason they switch is to save money. Munich did this for that same reason and then had to spend money to switch back to Windows in just a few years. Yes, its very possible to switch to Linux from Windows and yes there are replacement for paid license applications. But are they really capable or just that they are free so that's all that matters.
I suspect that the bigger "out of the box" applications won't be converted at all, instead the workers will be told what they use in the future. Preferably not too much new stuff at a time, so they don't have to relearn everything in short order.
The real problem might be with small, proprietary stuff. As a hypothetical example, the management software for the munipical public transport, which was written by some small software vendor 10 years ago. Of course, it is closed source, the vendor is bankrupt by now and the source code has been lost at some point.
C - the footgun of programming languages
But Linux zealots... err, I mean, advocates, have always insisted that GNU/Linux is already the perfect system. Have they been lying all these years?
I used yhe same exact process to migraye our family entirely to Linux. First to Firefox, Thunderbird and LibreOffice and then to Ubuntu. Nobody even noticed. Once i introduced multiseat and three people were able to use the computer at the same time, people start commenting what a better setup it is.
Real nerds don't like FOSS/Linux zealots because they are fascist assholes. They are the trolls. They endlessly preach that because the code is free, using that code ALWAYS saves money. Except that isn't true! It doesn't matter if the code is free. That's only part of what software is. If a large government agency needs software, they still need to pay for additional service to modify that code, provide end-user service, and do everything else that a commercial developer would do.
They spent so much on Coutinho that they had no money left for licensing fees...
In Munich, it was the change of major. The new one is known to be a Microsoft fanboi. Plus, Microsoft German headquarters are now in Munich. Coincidence?
If Microsof goes broke by bribi^H^H^H^H^Heducating city councils and moving headquarters around, we've achieved our goal too, you know.
Of course, it is closed source, the vendor is bankrupt by now and the source code has been lost at some point.
Then rewrite - not really a problem. If 'the source was lost' then the system was so small it didn't require security updates, or other changes when someone changes the bus timing, routes, taxation scheme, or pricing. Small systems are easily reimplemented - and they can use git this time.
Satya Nadella will attend and make a side trip to Barcelona.
I know lots of Slahshdotters (?) love them some Linux, but I've heard this story before, and it rarely ends up well.
Servers and specialized machines, sure... they are mostly running Linux anyways, so it's not a problem.
Government employees' computers? It's not only because Microsoft comes later on with enticing propositions, it's because people can't get used to distros like Ubuntu even when it's this user friendly or close to looking like Windows.
For regular users, it's almost like learning another language, but usually for Linux there's no one there that speaks their language to teach them what to do.
It's because there's a presumption, specially from power users, on how "regular people" use a computer. It's often assumed that they only need a browser, text editor, spreadsheet and a few other functionalities, but for the vast majority of cases it's more complicated than that.
And it tends to be something that either doesn't exist on Linux, or that works very differently there.
So yeah... I guess good luck for Barcelona. But they should look into cases like Munich, Brazil and some others before jumping into that bandwagon.
This really isn't about Open Source, it's about money and Spain is running out. Spain is one of the PIG nations with run away national debt ( Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Munich went the other direction and after a decade of attempting to run Linux on Government desktops, threw up their goose stepping hands and reverted to something that works - Windows.
https://www.linuxinsider.com/s...
Overall adoption of Linux desktop is only 1.5% (2017 numbers). Considering hackers, network admins, and die hard fanboys, that's abysmal.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/n...
It's been 20 years - time enough to realize that corporate and Government - where it matters - wide scale adoption of Linux desktop is failure. move on.
Unlike them LOL
I think Hawaii would get a lot more out of succeeding. Scrap the useless missile warning system and spend the money saved on schools.
Only, the problems in Munich mostly weren't even related to Linux. Even Microsoft's good old buddy Accenture said so.
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of a good Open Source bashing. Not even when they are delivered by your best friends.
Hawaii is entirely dependent on the US economically, which is why they're a part of the US to begin with. Hawaii can be as independent as they want, but they're only hurting themselves by trying.
But what both groups of separatists really want is just a special economic status.
It's not that simple. There is definitely a learning curve to use linux effectively. It's not about to give user a Linux ready system.
Tell that to my 86 year old father and his group of Linux using octogenarians. All they really need is a browser pointing to their favorite home pages and a printer.
You are mentally ill to think everything is Russians.
USA: invaded and crushes independent country
USA: imposes central bank on subjects and destroys their economic freedom
USA: See, look, they can't survive without us!
In a nutshell, your problems with the Linux desktop are that you're not a programmer. We do apologize for the second-class end-user experience. I promise that it all makes more sense if you use it daily for at least ten years, on all your systems, including a small fleet of headless servers, and learn at least three programming languages (plus Bash). I mean, not that I can really wholeheartedly recommend such things, but there is a perspective from which Linux is the easiest OS to use. Or perhaps we mean that Linux is the easiest "build-an-OS kit" to use (batteries included, some assembly required). It is certainly not for everyone, and it may not be for you. Sorry about the bad experiences.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Real nerds:
45 years old, living in the same room as they were in grade school, having their parents' do their laundry, cooks their meals, asking for money every time a new overhyped game comes out and so they can whine about how much its sucks and hanging out with red pillers whining about why girls don't like them.
You really think that a city in SPAIN is going to go looking for hardware in the US or UK (Trump / Brexit)?
GAWD what an idiot.
"But what can I do?" you ask. Well publiccode is about making politicians aware that it's their damned duty to consider alternatives to lock-in, instead of letting themselves "be educated" by rich lobbies. So go sign the open letter if you haven't yet.
Of course, read it first: but if the only obstacle is your lazy ass, *GO* *NOW*
pretty please :-)
Wow, will Open-Xchange really do everything MS Exchange will?
You completely misunderstood my comments. I am saying another City going to waste millions of dollars without doing research; especially how this has failed many time before (I have been part of several of them). I don't like to see wasted tax dollars. I am a nerd and I am *IX user and supporter & would love to see *IX used more everywhere in the world. I have been a government contractor and seen billions wasted because someone (always non-IT) thinks this "New Idea" will be great we will save a lot of money. In the end they typically spent 3x what they would have and then go back to what was working before the change. This was not a flame or troll. -WS