City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software
joinup.ec.europa.eu
City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software
1–10 of 69 posts
Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software
#2Hopefully it would work out better than in Munich.
Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software
#3It's nice to see the FSFE being active, and making an actual difference. Our donations are not in vain.
Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software
#4Hopefully it would work out better than in Munich.
I'm sure it's quite a lot more feasible now than it was when Munich embarked on their adventure.
And one would also hope they have used Munich as a good case study.
Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software
#5Hopefully it would work out better than in Munich.
Context [0], for anyone interested.
[0]: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-e...
Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software
#6Hopefully it would work out better than in Munich.
Munich was pretty good. It's been deployed for 4+ years and won't be replaced until the end of 2020 (assuming everything goes to plan) so that will be at least 7 years of use. It seems that the reasons to move back to Windows weren't completely technical either.
Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software
#7Hopefully it would work out better than in Munich.
Be prepared to a subtle PR war from proprietary solutions vendors, not blatantly directed at software (eg. not like giving 10000 free copies of Windows + Office + this and that) but indirectly helping the city to gain public acceptance, say funding schools, hospitals, public infrastructures etc. then offering at the same time the option to local politicians to get their face associated with the events.
What politician would refuse the opportunity to address a speech during the inauguration of say a new library/hospital/mall/police station/parking lot etc. built with money that did not came from taxing people? That would make a hell of an argument during election time, so you can consider him technically sold to whoever the money comes from, even though he didn't get a single dime in the process, which of course will mean that once he is in power he will use whatever software solution the founder is "suggesting" to keep his seat.
Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software
#8Hopefully it would work out better than in Munich.
Munich was pretty good. It's been deployed for 4+ years and won't be replaced until the end of 2020 (assuming everything goes to plan) so that will be at least 7 years of use. It seems that the reasons to move back to Windows weren't completely technical either.
It's hard to come up with technical reasons for picking one OS over another for general business use. All of the operating systems are good enough. They have been for a long time.
What drives OS choice is (and always has been) application support and cost. Despite Linux being free, it can be expensive to support or even an impossible choice if you need, for example, Microsoft Office or Final Cut.
More often than not, Linux wins on ideological grounds. There's nothing wrong with that, but you do need buy-in from your users.
Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software
#9Hopefully it would work out better than in Munich.
Context [0], for anyone interested. [0]: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/end-of-an-open-source-e...
Thanks for the link.
"Those supporting the move to Microsoft Office say staff using LibreOffice find it difficult to swap documents with external organizations, due to incompatibilities with Microsoft Office"
This happens all around the industry. Once you are locked in there is no easy way to change. This renders the capitalist concept of competition obsolete. Everything becomes a monopoly. Intel, Nvidia, Facebook, Microsoft, Google... they amount of 90% of the market on their products.
What was 20 years ago a dynamic fast changing industry, that feared anti-monopoly actions from the goverment, has become a short list of big companies with tight ties with politicians.
Such lack of diversity opens the risk that a vulnerability is going to send all our IT into chaos, as Intel issues have showed up. It also hampers innovation and contributes to a world with less opportunities for new entrepreneurs, that are more focused in created something to sell to a big company than a long term viable business.
So Munich decision is part of the problem, but just an small one. I hope that it works better for Barcelona.
Re: City of Barcelona moving away from proprietary software
#10So what will be the cost of deploying Linux, retraining on Linux, and then going back to Windows?
These people can afford to make stupid decisions because it's not their own money they are wasting.
The only reason this is happening is crony capitalism: they want to do a favour to the local open source businesses (there are a few of them) which are friendly to the local government. They will get lots of support contracts. It's blatant corruption.