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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.
To be fair, a good chunk of blame for that goes to Linux. I still have nightmares about setting up Samba shares that work reliably.
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.