Gummersbach, a town in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, has announced that it has completed its switch to Linux PCs. The switch was done in the wake of Microsoft’s discontinuation of Windows XP support.
This migration has saved the town a sum in five figures. It might not be as lucrative as one million euro saved by French city Toulouse with open source migration, but the town will save more in future with savings on proprietary licences and lower hardware costs.
The city administration now uses 300 thin client PCs, with desktop and SuSE Linux Terminal Server cluster of six servers. The desktop environment is Mate. These PCs use LibreOffice office suite and the Open-Xchange suite of email, instant messaging, calendaring and online collaboration tools.
25 PCs has been retained to run Microsoft Windows in order to run specific applications used by the Civil Service desk, and for computer aided design software in use by the town.
Open Source adoption trend has been quite positive in European cities. It has boosted up after the demise of Windows XP. Several Italian and Spanish cities have already opted for open source alternatives. I wish to hear more such news in future.
Source: Open source obervatory
Abhishek, Good article, I always like things on your blog. We too have couple of Indian Success stories of adopting Linux.
I think, if we wan to make impact on Indian IT scenario, we will need more Indian stories.
More stories can be found on
http://www.enjayworld.com/blog/topics/tiguin/
What say ?
[…] completes switch to open source [aqui] e […]
I noticed they kept MS for CAD work. I run MicroStation SE, J (7.1) and V8 in Linux Mint with WINE API converter. It works extremely well, even with 3D rendering and sold modeling and surfaces.
Try Draftsight, Linux and windows versions. I’m teaching myself cad on it. Opens the DWG files I’m sent so I can play with/modify them. Linux version says beta but I haven’t come across any issues so far
Sadly the opposite happens as well: Microsoft established their German headquarters in Munich and now the urban administration is considering switching back to Windows after ten years of using linux.
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/gadgets/linux-auf-behoerden-pc-muenchen-vor-umstieg-auf-windows-a-995546.html#js-article-comments-box-pager
I have heard of it. But they are considering it, nothing has finalized yet. Fingers crossed.
They can go backwards with MS, get infected and have to deal with “proprietary” and “activations”. They will also be dealing with anti-virus, something that I avoided completey for 15 years using Linux.
If they take a serious look at the mess that the Windows “Metro” interface has become and the “ribbon menu” in Microsoft Office programs, they’ll probably forget about Windows permanently. There are plenty of reports and reviews of how these changes have angered long-time Microsoft users and decreased productivity, because someone at Microsoft thought it would be nice to introduce change just for the sake of change, without adequately testing user reaction.