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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.
It would appear that Barcelona may have planned their migration to Open-Source much better than Munich did. Per TFS, Barcelona began using Open-Source applications within Windows, long before they took the step to replace the underlying OS. That way, they had all their staff trained on the Open-Source tools, so the switch of the OS would be less onerous.
This will be worth watching. I wish them luck.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
So, Windows-based networks can cohabit with Mac and Linux devices just fine, but Linux-based networks can't do this? That seems a little hard to believe.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
My understanding is that Munich had to keep a fraction of machines under windows, because some of their proprietary software was not easily migrated to open source. But they still wanted to (mostly) avoid the expense of migrating to a new version of Windows, which would have required hardware updates as well as new licenses. So they went ahead and got into some technical difficulties, as well as push back from users.
Overall, I think Barcelona has the better strategy here, even if it will take them longer. Both in terms of a smooth transition on the technical side and in terms of less excuses for unwilling users.
Because if you replace the software in smaller increments, the claim the whole system sucks does not work anymore. Instead, you can require people to be more specific with their complaints. Such as Joe Shmoe saying "Libre Office does not work with my documents". Then a support guy can visit Joe and ask him to demonstrate the problem, and how to fix it will become more obvious.
- If only Joe did not understand how to use that feature in Libre Office, show him.
- If many employees have problems using Libre Office, your training program might suck. Improve it, maybe invest in more training time for each employee.
- If it is a genuine bug, work with the Libre Office developers to fix it. Maybe actually hire some developers for that.
C - the footgun of programming languages