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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
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
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.
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.
....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
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!
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.
there, fixed that for you
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
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
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
The whole customer service departments of all three aren't on MS Office now? That's like.. four... people? SUCK IT MICROSOFT!