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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.
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.
I don't need to be psychic to work out where you're from...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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
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.
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.
I don't need to be psychic to work out where you're from...
Now, now - Redmond's schools are better than that.
#DeleteChrome
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?
Governments aren't necessarily horribly inefficient, though. If you look at healthcare, they seem to be quite efficient. However, any large organisation has pockets of inefficiency, and governments are no exception. Some of the inefficiency is driven by frequent changes of direction in policy, although that can also happen in any large organisation. Keeping track of government efficiency is a good thing, and the GAO serves that purpose nominally, and just about every Western nation has an equivalent, as well as the press
If the idea is to maximise the benefit to citizenry, then keeping a check on monopoly, which the FTC does, may fulfil this, as monopolies can lead to abuse (qv. Standard Oil).
On the other hand, there are a range of things that the private sector does better than government. For example, I certainly wouldn't want to buy government-designed clothing from an official government store!
Europeans love to hate on American companies. Just see all of the court cases the European Union brings against American companies (Apple and Microsoft being the first two to spring to mind).
There are no European companies in IT that are so dominant, so the EU can't bring action against them.
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.
More like the country of Tabarnia /troll-mode-off
(or if we go back several centuries, the county of Barcelona)
there, fixed that for you
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
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 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
Europeans love to hate on American companies. Just see all of the court cases the European Union brings against American companies (Apple and Microsoft being the first two to spring to mind).
Have you looked at the list of court cases the European Union brings against companies? I'm guessing not, and I'm also guessing that you read about these court cases only in the tech press where they're reporting only on cases brought against big tech firms where American companies tend to dominate, and not against other markets where EU companies dominate.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Get pissed that your govts allow these tax havens to exist. You know it’s for the benefit of the rich. Shut them down.
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
I once finally got a Linux distro up and running after literally days of struggling with hardware recognition. Opened a console and did a "apt-get upgrade" command, rebooted, total system meltdown. Reinstalled Windows because I had enough of Linux by then, and asked on a forum why that happened. The answer was that I should have used the accompanying GUI instead... Uhmmm... so why was I allowed to do that command in the first place? Why did it thrash the system? What kind of lame excuse is that to begin with? I could ask you how you even manage to get a Linux distro up and running and maintaining it. Linux feels like a house of cards that can collapse just by looking at it the wrong way. Do you get your hardware in some magic Chinese webshop? Asking because I've tried giving many, many distros a try, and they all fail at recognizing some piece of hardware... and the all fail to find different pieces of hardware on different distros. I've long since given up on even trying out Linux anymore despite giving it several tries over the span of a decade.
In a nutshell, my problems with the Linux desktop are:
- It is quite difficult to configure, especially if you have a slightly out of the ordinary configuration (And in some cases it may be virtually impossible, I've had more than one case where I've had to look at really obscure forums to solve a hardware problem and all I could find was users asking about the same thing);
- The user interfaces are very inconsistent, where usually every application behaves the way it wants instead of respecting the system behavior (copy/paste for example);
- The process of installing a recent version of an application usually involves updating important system libraries and this operation is not always safe or can be done in a safe way (usually the update ends up breaking the functionality of other applications that you never imagined could have relationship);
- Often a more significant system upgrade can leave the entire system inoperable and with no means to go back, so the only secure way to upgrade your system is to reinstall everything from the new version DVD;
- Have you ever had the need to customize a large application for your use and so you tried to install from the source code? It's a disaster.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
They spent so much on Coutinho that they had no money left for licensing fees...
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.
Munich -> Barcelona. The "year of Linux" is starting to feel like a relay!
In all seriousness, though- hope this works out well for them. There are clearly challenges, but moving away from any monoculture is a good thing.
Ah, the other problem that I occasionally encounter with Linux... When I complain about Linux desktop problems (some that have not been solved for years), instead of trying to fix the problems, they moderate me as "troll" for telling a uncomfortable truth. When the users of my systems complain about something I go there and fix it, instead of ignoring what they say.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I detailed into another comment, you just not bothered to read before reply. Now go bother someone else.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
This isn't a tech help/Linux help forum. Google for the fucking answer. The problem you admitted to having sounds like a made up one. Millions of functioning Linux desktops say otherwise bunk.
You Are The Problem
Is because of assholes like YOU that linux does not advance. Now Fuckoff.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
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.
I know a bunch of programming languages like ASP, PHP, C#, plus some other on a need to know basis. I've made quite a few scripts using PowerShell to do some mundane tasks like cleaning up firewall rules or synchronizing files between OneDrive and Gdrive. I'm currently learning R. That idiot comment you made is also typical Linux community style that does nothing but drive people away. Toxic community, stupid operating system that cant do anything besides making everything hard, that's Linux in a nutshell.
Ive said it a thousand of time until their is some kinda campaign finance reform where politicians are not reliant on the rich for their money NOTHING will ever change. I sure dont have the answer i have a few ideas but the government we know today is bought and paid for by corporate America and the rich how can joe public compete? Sure we can vote the bastards out but then who do we put back in? they both vote party line.
Jack of all trades,master of none
You just described my Windows experience, never had those issues with Linux, then again, I never got used to a GUI with Windows 95 only coming to market a few years before I was finishing school.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Europeans love to hate on billion dollar tax invaders. There, fixed it for you.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
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
20 years? I would say 5. Every year I try a new Linux desktop distro (or a new version) to see the state of things and if they finally learned how to make a desktop (the server works fine but I want a desktop okay?), and every year I end up giving up and staying with Windows 7 (Windows 10 is bizarrely following the same path of the linux desktop, so I I'll stick with the Windows 7 until further notice).
You've got 2 years left to get used to Linux ...
P.S: Sometimes I almost feel like I've been able to leave my Linux desktop as I would like (using KDE in Linux Mint for example), but then something always breaks down in a disastrous way because of some update or something that should be trivial like installing a new version of GIMP.
1)What happens when you don't upgrade to the latest point-release of GIMP?
2)How *were* you upgrading? I guess not via a distro-vetted
3)These days, if you need a new version of software not available from your distro, you can easily get a (much bigger) version via flatpak or similar (AppImage, snaps etc.). The GIMP is available from flathub.org (as are Slack, Spotify, Skype etc.).
- It is quite difficult to configure, especially if you have a slightly out of the ordinary configuration (And in some cases it may be virtually impossible, I've had more than one case where I've had to look at really obscure forums to solve a hardware problem and all I could find was users asking about the same thing);
Can you give a concrete example? Most things a home user would need work out-the-box.
- The user interfaces are very inconsistent, where usually every application behaves the way it wants instead of respecting the system behavior (copy/paste for example);
cmd.exe doesn't copy when I press CTRL-C, so it's not like Windows is 100% consistent. Mac OS X is better in this regard, but has it's own keyboard-related irritations.
- The process of installing a recent version of an application usually involves updating important system libraries and this operation is not always safe or can be done in a safe way (usually the update ends up breaking the functionality of other applications that you never imagined could have relationship);
If you do things you shouldn't, yes this can happen. Either use your distros repos (e.g. a well-known PPA), or use Flatpak's from flathub.org, or AppImage releases, or snaps. This is equivalent to what happens on Windows (every app ships it's own copy of MSVCRT and all the DLLs it needs, or you have DLL hell).
- Often a more significant system upgrade can leave the entire system inoperable and with no means to go back, so the only secure way to upgrade your system is to reinstall everything from the new version DVD;
Never seen this myself. And in the event you do need to do a new install (like a new system), all your own settings can be easily copied across with minimal effort.
- Have you ever had the need to customize a large application for your use and so you tried to install from the source code? It's a disaster.
Is customising a large app from source code any easier on any other OS? It seems much easier on Linux than, say, Windows.
First it is quite important that you understand, very clearly, that I used GIMP just as an example of what usually happens when I try to install or update new applications on Linux.
This said, my real problem with the process of installing applications on Linux is that usually an installation that has had problems ends up causing system-wide problems (And even installations that have succeeded can cause these system problems) and when you try to fix these issues (especially when using package management) the problem ends up getting even bigger (More than once the package manager required removing the entire GNOME to allow me to return a library to the correct version, WTF?). It's really hard for me to have a problem like this in Windows.
And note that I am a developer, sooner or later I end up finding a way around these problems. But imagine the problem for anyone who is not a developer and he wants to use Linux.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Can you give a concrete example? Most things a home user would need work out-the-box.
Easy: Try to jack three monitors on a desktop with two video cards (one Intel, one nVidia), where one monitor is DisplayPort and the others are HDMI. I spent an afternoon trying to make it work.
cmd.exe doesn't copy when I press CTRL-C, so it's not like Windows is 100% consistent. Mac OS X is better in this regard, but has it's own keyboard-related irritations.
Do you use as an example the only known case where copy/paste does not work between applications in Windows? Really?
If you do things you shouldn't, yes this can happen.
Funny thing, most packages seems do to that most of time, specially when I try to install a recent version from some application
Never seen this myself. And in the event you do need to do a new install (like a new system), all your own settings can be easily copied across with minimal effort.
Lucky you, here happens most of the time
Is customising a large app from source code any easier on any other OS? It seems much easier on Linux than, say, Windows
Well, usually i do not need to do that on Windows, you know.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
First it is quite important that you understand, very clearly, that I used GIMP just as an example of what usually happens when I try to install or update new applications on Linux.
Sure, and the solutions apply, equally, to other applications too.
This said, my real problem with the process of installing applications on Linux is that usually an installation that has had problems ends up causing system-wide problems (And even installations that have succeeded can cause these system problems) and when you try to fix these issues (especially when using package management) the problem ends up getting even bigger (More than once the package manager required removing the entire GNOME to allow me to return a library to the correct version, WTF?).
Right, but most likely you did something wrong here, e.g. (using Fedora as an example) using Rawhide repos on a non-Rawhide installation in order to try and get updated packages. Some distros specifically provide backport repos which try and provide as many up-to-date packages as possible, but it isn't always possible for all applications.
It's really hard for me to have a problem like this in Windows.
Because you don't try and install Windows 10 components on Windows 7 (because they aren't accessible in the same way as repos for Linux distros are).
And note that I am a developer, sooner or later I end up finding a way around these problems. But imagine the problem for anyone who is not a developer and he wants to use Linux.
Sometimes it seems to me developers think that using software should be easier for them, and they do the wrong things because 'l33t developer'. Or alternatively, maybe some of the tooling should be more idiot-proof.
Anyway, I already provided examples of the current solutions to these problems, that normal users can access easily, AppImages, and Flatpak and Snaps.
For example, Digikam and some other projects publish AppImages on their sites/mirrors, you download the file, and run it (similar to .app bundles on MacOS). The first time you run it, it will ask if it should set up menu entries for you. If you agree, from then on you access the app (run the .appimage) from the normal menu.
Flatpak and Snap require some support from the distro (but most distros ship with the tooling for both), and as far as I know, both make it very easy to install new versions or 3rd-party apps from application repos. I have only used Flatpak, and it worked fine to install Spotify, Skype and Slack. Install gnome-software via your distro's package manager (if it isn't installed by default), start it from the menu, search/browse for apps, click the install button (enter your root password when prompted), launch the app from your normal desktop menu (in my case, KDE, but it should work for any xdg-complaint desktop). I assume Snaps are similar.
KDE's discover, which supports the distro's native package manager, also supports Flatpak in the new version (on Plasma 5.10, I have 5.8.7 on the machine I use most).
Here is the only recent screenshot I could find of gnome-software in a quick search.
Of course, there are still advantages to using the native distro package manager, but if your distro doesn't ship some software, or doesn't have a new version, at present it is often easy to get a new version via Flatpak, and soon it will be seamless on most desktops.
Go have a look at the apps available on Flathub.