New List For Linux in Government Initiatives

nullbyte writes "We have created a new list to discuss open-source integration/migration for governments. Our aim is to gather knowledge of successful or unsuccessful migration attempts and set up a public facility to pinpoint the key issues for a successful migration to open source. If you have heard of any migration that went sour we would like to learn about it as much as hearing reports from successfull migrations."

Why bother?

[ka9dgx]

With the Bush victory, why bother? Microsoft's going to CRUSH any efforts at open source in the US.

--Mike--

PS: Got Prozac?

Re:Why bother?

[call.me.pete]

Ignore the first four words of the above comment; does that make it more relevant? Microsoft pays lobbyists big buck$ to convince politicians that commercial software means jobs and revenue and growth and apple pie and all things good and American, while free software means communism and no jobs and no revenue and other evil, un-American stuff.

It doesn't matter what's true and what's FUD. You can't avoid dealing with politics and politicians and lobbyists if you want to make changes in the way governments

Re:Why bother?

[ceh4702]

There are plenty of applications for Linux in the Business Sector and in education. I work for a community college and we have been using an IBM X-server for our mainframe. It is basically just a Dual PIII X-Server whith some mainframe emulation software called FLEX-ES. We use a version of SUSE Linux with the emulation software and then install the IBM Mainframe software. It works just as fast as our old mainframe. The server is custom built by an outfit down in Florida. It takes some special I/O card

Sources?

[Daengbo]

I wonder if you are using any info supplied by governments currently pushing OSS. Try contacting Thailand, Laos, and many S. American countries.

FLOSSpols conference on the subject

[jeremie_z_]

any european folk interested by this subject should come to TheHague on nov the 18th to attend FlossPols [flosspols.org] :

take a look at the speakers list [flosspols.org] to get an idea of how "high-level" this event can be.

representatives from the European Union, the IDA (the organism from the EU responsible for an excellent "opensource migration guidelines" report), and from various state-ministries from all around europe will gather there around "FLOSS in government", giving concrete experience-returns and precious advise i think...

Re:FLOSSpols conference on the subject

[nullbyte]

Thanks for this valuable pointer. I just announced this on the list. regards, ~/joachim

Gobierno del Distrito Federal (Mexico), 1999-2000

[chochos]

I heard some stuff about an effort that was being made during 1999-2000 in the Mexico City government. I don't know much about the details, just that they were trying to dump Microsoft because of costs, and were seriously considering Linux. I don't know how far they got. What I heard was that in the end, the software was going to be a lot cheaper but the people who offered support contracts was charging too much so the savings were not that great and it was probably easy for MS to offer the typical discount.