Vienna government to adopt open source
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Office move for 7,500 desktops.
26 January 2004 The Viennese local government has become the latest European public sector body to announce plans to migrate its users away from Microsoft's software.
The Austrian capital has earmarked 7,500 of its 16,000 PCs for migration to productivity application OpenOffice by June 2005. Potentially 4,800 of these could move to a Linux operating system as well.
OpenOffice - an open source equivalent of Microsoft's Office software - runs on both Windows and Linux operating systems, and Viennese users will be able to choose which operating system they prefer.
"This will be a soft migration," said Erwin Gillich, head of IT at Vienna's municipal authority. "We want this decision to be a success, but the internal market will decide," he added.
Vienna's IT department has been working on a bespoke open-source operating system, based on the Debian distribution of Linux, since late last year. According to Gillich, the program will be called Wienux, and will be modified to closely resemble Windows.
Gillich hopes that its Wienux system will be cheaper than commercial versions of Linux, such as SuSe and Red Hat, providing a compelling cost-benefit argument to move from Windows. But he predicts that only a few hundred users will make the transition in the first year.
The decision by the Viennese government comes on the heels of other European government departments. Munich, for example, announced in June that it plans to migrate 14,000 PCs to OpenOffice by 2008, while the city of Bergen in Norway plans to migrate some 32,000 computers in its schools to Linux over the next few years.
Links: http://www.infoconomy.com/pages/search/group96023.adp
