Down under, something very big has happened very quietly. Kennards Hire, a major machinery rental company, engaged in a massive migration to desktop Linux, the biggest the country has yet seen, with nary a peep from the national media. Steven Deare of ZDNet Australia noticed this and decided to investigate:
[ZDNet] tried to cover the rollout […]
Kings College School in Cambridge recently switched to an open source network infrastructure in partnership with Sirius Corporation. The move was not just an exercise in saving money - the move has also saved the IT staff precious time. Wendy Harris, the network manager at the school, said:
“Without open source we would spend our […]
The regional government of the Spanish region of Extremedura, home to a major open source network, has announced it is to switch entirely to open source software.
The administration has, since 2005, been migrating it’s health business operations to Linux with the help of IBM, but now intends to follow these pilot projects by moving all […]
From Heise.de:
The administration of the Berlin Senate (the governement of the German federal state Berlin) has voiced its opposition to a complete migration of the authority’s computers to Linux. It thus opposes the Berlin Parliament, which called for a two-phase migration of servers and workstations to Open Sources systems. The report presented to heise online […]
With Vista’s delay adding to claims from the likes of Novell and Red Hat that this is the year Linux is going to break through, a senior analyst from the leading IT analysts the Meta Group has suggested that everyone should take a serious look at open source or web-based alternatives to Microsoft’s next generation […]
Following a re-evaluation of their IT strategy, Bristol City Council have decided to consolidate their office software - currently a mixture of Microsoft Office, Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect - around a single software suite. The “obvious choice” of Microsoft Office was rejected in favour of Sun’s StarOffice on the grounds of cost, licensing and standards […]
The company’ online entertainment division is to migrate several of the databases serving its gaming community to OSS provided by EnterpriseDB. A company veep justified the decision to go open on the grounds of licensing costs and the decision to go with EnterpriseDB on the grounds of their compatibility with Oracle’s software.
IBM announced last week that, come the release of Vista later in the year, it will not be installing the new operating software on any of its desktops. Furthermore, the company will not renew its desktop software contract with Microsoft when it expires in October.
They will instead migrate those users still on XP onto its […]
Search Open Source has a piece on one of the barriers to Linux adoption, the lack of an iteration of Microsoft Office for the platform. Focusing on the inevitable comparisons between OpenOffice.org and MS’s offering, it includes the sage advice “Stop whining and embrace change”:
There’s a contingent of IT folks, however, who discount these complaints […]
South Africa’s Tectonic talked to some of the people from development charity Oxfam behind its “carefully planned” migration to FLOSS. The organisation’s intranet was originally built around Microsoft’s ASP but they’ve now moved to a LAMP stack with minimal staff retraining.
Should someone in your life need converting, here are 25 good reasons to ditch Windows and go Linux, courtesy of Belle Vue Linux.
Zegenie Stuidos has created a quiz (still in beta) that aims to help Linux newbies to decide which distro to go for. Spookily enough, it came up with an exact match for the distro I use (Ubuntu) along with an explanation of the distro and why it ruled out the likes of Debian and Mepis.
More […]
Paris has announced details of a test migration to Linux as part of its push to use more open source software. This is from the Tech World article linked above:
Earlier this year, volunteers among the city’s 46,000 staff were invited to download and install open-source software, including the Firefox browser and Open Office.org. Now, the […]
Auction house Bonham’s is to move to OSS, as is Matalan, whilst The Age reports on an electronics company making a u–turn, just eight months after moving from Windows to Linux.
Information Week has some thoughts on the reasons multinationals opt for open source in particular situations, and there’s more interesting stuff on Massachussets’s decision to […]
It was suggested a few months ago that Microsoft’s anti–pirate strategy — withholding non–security patches unless you bought a licence — might backfire on them it could make users more inclined to look at free alternatives. Now, Microsoft has provoked ire with an announcement that Vista “Enterprise Edition” will only be available to customers who […]
The fair city of Munich, described by some as the poster boy of the Linux Movement, has once again fallen prey to their country’s notorious inefficiency and delayed its move to open source software, this time until 2006. The delay is due to an extension of the pilot phase of the project; the migration proper […]
PublicTechnology.net has a story on government agency The Design Council’s decision to migrate their website to the open source Open Harmonise software.
Anyone wishing to try out Linux on their desktop should check this out - a demonstration of an open source desktop that runs within Windows.
The Inquirer has an article on the site.
After the merger of Avon and Bristol counties, the new body decided they’d rather not spend £2 million - 1% on their council tax - on upgrading to MS Office. Instead, they gave Sun’s Star Office a whirl at the knock down price of £186,000, leaving them with enough change to fund training and support […]
The municipalities of Zagreb in Croatia and Marseilles in France have both involved themselves with open source recently.
Zagreb has started to modernise its IT infrastructure, and has decided to use OSS in order to keep costs down. It is planning to collaborate with the local university for staff training. You can read more about it […]