Topic: a small but significant victory for Open Source

[wyron]

Have you heard over there beyond the pond ?
Yesterday the city council of Munich, Germany, decided for a change in platform from MS to Linux.
In short:
MS informs all customers that support for the NT4 platform will be discontinued shortly, and advices the upgrade to server 2k3, with subsequent upgrade to XP and XP Office.
The city council of Munich grumbles and begins to discuss alternatives.
IBM and the German SUSE Linux distribution seem to offer a realistic alternative.
Steve Ballmer, breaking off his skeeing holiday in Switzerland, rushes to Munich to offer a 15% discount on an overall purchase for their +14.000 units.
The city council, still grumbling, seem to think that the alternative still smells better.
Steve Ballmer rushes in again, offering a further 7 million Euro discount (roughly 7,5 to 8 million US$).
Yesterday the city council of Munich decided on a change in platform !
Linux with Open Office !
Who gets the enterprise is still open, but SUSE and IBM are strong candidates.
May I quote the Mayor of Munich: 'Not only have Munich decided on a greater freedom of choice, when it comes to platform, but this case has clearly shown that competition has a significant influence on pricing !'

Congratulations Munich !!!!

Greetings to all my friends over there
WyRon

[Ray Mitchell]

WOW !!
That'll shake Bill up a bit (more) !

Ray

[Jochen Hoegerl]

>That'll shake Bill up a bit (more)

Yes, the GE Government is giving "Bill" a hard time. It started 2 years ago
with surveys to replace "WinServers" with OpenSource OS. They supported
the development of "GnuPP" (a userfriendly Windowsport of gnupg-tools).
The Parliament has replaced a serious number of it's Servers to Linux.
A Linux-based Krypto-box has been invented to ease secure data-exchange
between their nets. OpenSource Systems are now "officially" allowed within
Government IT. And they forced "Bill" to invent a tool to delete the defrag-tool
in W2k (diskkeeper ?) because the owner of this firm is a member of "scientology"
which makes it suspect to the government, and they said they wouldn't upgrade/
buy W2k if it couldn't be deleted. Right now surveys/ testing is going on to
replace even desktop's to OpenSource.

Jochen