Vienna’s Municipal Authority has joined Munich in its plans to swap to Open Source software. Vienna plans to offer 7,500 staff the option of swapping to a version of Debian Linux called Wienux on their workstations. In early 2003, Munich announced a plan to swap 14,000 of their desktop and notebook machines to Linux. These two are just the tip of the iceberg, pretty much every government in the EU (as well as countries including but not limited to China, Japan, the USA, Australia and India) are all either running Linux in parts of their infrastructure, or they are evaluating it for that purpose. Linux is not a geek only operating system any more.
The reasons for the change is not as simple as you’d think. It isn’t just for pricing, and it isn’t just for the extra security. Those two are probably additional benefits, but most of the reason seems to be to avoid being locked into a single provider (usually Microsoft) with their data. The idea of open standards and interoperability haven’t really been well accepted at Redmond, so they have made no efforts to help OSS like Linux and their own software to work together unless ordered to do so. That is going to hurt them in the long run. A few of the Municipalities that have made significant moves to OSS software include: Bergen (Norway’s second-largest city), the German Federal Finance Office, the French Ministry of Equipment (1500 Windows servers swapped to Linux), Paris city authority (17,000 desktops), Rome City Council (filesharing, email and web portal servers) , The German Federal Finance Office (replacing old servers with Linux mainframe) in fact the German Federal government have given Linux and open source it’s approval and backing, so OSS usage should spread much faster over there now.
There are a ton of big business’s also swapping to, or already running Linux, a few of the bigger ones include DaimlerChrysler, Autozone, the Allied Irish Banks. Linux now runs on a huge array of devices, some of which you may already have, devices including TIVO’s, Linksys and Netgear routers, Motorola, NEC and Panasonic mobile phones, car computers (both engine and entertainment), cash registers, PDA’s and more. If you have one of these items, and you didn’t know it was running Linux, then it was obviously doing it’s job pretty well. Also, Linux appears to be the choice of operating systems for super computers, apparently over half of the world’s top 500 supercomputers run the upstart OS (in fact 4 of the top 5 super computers in the world are running Linux). Viva the revolution! 🙂
