Spain's Extremadura Starts Move To GNU/Linux, Open Source

jrepin writes "The government of Spain's autonomous region of Extremadura has begun the switch to open source of it desktop PCs. The government expects the majority of its 40,000 PCs to be migrated this year, the region's CIO Theodomir Cayetano announced on 18 April. Extremadura estimates that the move to open source will help save 30 million euro per year. Extremadura in 2012 completed the inventory of all the software applications and computers used by its civil servants. It also tailored a Linux distribution, Sysgobex, to meet the majority of requirements of government tasks. It has already migrated to open source some 150 PCs at several ministries, including those for Development, Culture and Employment."

Re:Hardly an issue these days

[ElberethZone]

Not like my 80 millions € SOA project were they had the "clever" idea to create a .Net front-end to the web-services instead of a web-application... The worst thing in this case is that they needed to have the front-end available to third parties which cannot run .Net. Their solution: Citrix remote access... :( Architecture at his best.

Re:Europe has been adapting Linux....

[miknix]

This is old news - in these pages itself, the first time they started on it was 2006 [slashdot.org], and last year, too, there was another story [slashdot.org] on their experiment here. Extremadura, Munich and Portugal happen to be pretty unique/ahead in this regard - do a search on their stories over this experiment.

Except the current Portuguese government decided to start replacing some of the machines running GNU/Linux with Windows. There were even some problems in the transition of the government website infrastructure, because the new Microsoft solution could not serve as much client requests as the previous Linux-based one, leading to a massive downtime which lasted weeks [1].

I don't want to speculate but most probably the new team assigned to manage the government website did only have knowledge on Microsoft technologies, so the old previous system had to go.... This is a shame because they did it during an Economical crisis, wasting money on Windows server license keys and all other associated costs which they did not have before (since it was already running Linux).

[1] http://exameinformatica.sapo.pt/web/exameinformatica/noticias/internet/2012-04-04-sistema-de-redundancia-do-portal-do-governo-nao-funcionou;jsessionid=7AE120CAF45F6309EC0DB51D0D8E70D5 [exameinformatica.sapo.pt]

Not that wrong

[dutchwhizzman]

Using this argument without facts to back up why one solution costs more than the other can indeed be wrong. However, by itself it applies just fine. I've seen situations where an organization had 400 windows desktop computers and 200 Linux workstations. Both were used by end users, both had no admin rights for those end users. about 150 of the 200 Linux boxes were used by users that also had a windows machine. About 50 Linux machines were used as the only desk top computer. This implies that all critical systems like time management, e-mail, word processing and such were perfectly doable on the Linux machines. The entire windows support team, including servers, was about 30 FTE. The entire UNIX team had 2.5 FTE working on desktop support and about 10FTE working on servers (several hundred of them, several different OSes, doing 24/7 HA stuff). In this situation, the efficiency of the UNIX team was much bigger than that of the windows team. Given the fact that both had licenses on the desktop machines and the linux machines had significantly faster and more expensive hardware, in the end, the cost of both systems per desk top was more or less equivalent. In the end, the finance picture is much more complicated than just looking at support or license costs. In the end you select which system gets things done and is future proof for the most competitive price. Sometimes that is windows, sometimes it's not.