10mo ago

German state moving 30,000 PCs to Linux and LibreOffice - The Document Foundation Blog

blog.documentfoundation.org German state moving 30,000 PCs to LibreOffice - The Document Foundation Blog

Following a successful pilot project, the northern German federal state of Schleswig-Holstein has decided to move from Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office to Linux and LibreOffice (and other free and open source software) on the 30,000 PCs used in the local government. As reported on the homepage...

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Well, guy who actually lives there (Schleswig-Holstein) here. Be precise in what's written in tfa. What it laments about is that one (single) work place is about to be installed and that subsequent steps are about to follow.
I don't want to sound too pessimistic here. The fact, that this topic is on the high level agenda shows that it has strong supporters - for the moment.
But weighing in past decades' province goverment's spendings in large scale software projects and peoples' fear of everything even marginally IT, I'm very reluctant to see the big move here. Opposition against changes to my windows is simply unfathomable strong.
Nevertheless - and I mean that - it's a good development.
- Do they seem like they are paying for a integrator like SUSE (they are THE German commercial FOSS/Linux company in my head) or is it more enthusiasts trying to push changes and providing support?
  
  I guess it will be even worse. Instead of taking good money for hiring good people (I know this strategy is over simplified, as there are mandatory regulations for gv not being allowed to compete with the private sector. But if there would be the political will to find a way, there would be a way), gv will take even more money and found a consortium of 'experts' who will spend most of the funding to invent an exceptionally complex new wheel that none has ever seen before and take years in development... And the next gv will roll back. And that's that. Thinking about it I notice how desillusionated I became over the years...
  Hopefully I will be wrong. This time. At least once.
- Doesn't matter, it only needs to stick once. And each year the big projects FOSS/Linux have tremendous improvements so if it's half decent in the eyes of the gv users it'll be a big Win

143 comments