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Nine German cities poised to adopt Linux (InfoWorld)
InfoWorld reports
that nine (more) German cities (Alzey, Kaiserslautern, Koblenz, Landau,
Mainz, Neustadt, Speyer, Trier and Worms, all in Rheinland Pfalz) are
looking at switching over to Linux. "The cost of licensing Microsoft
products and the lack of support for some of them, such as the NT operating
system, which is still used widely in many city administrations, are among
the chief reasons for the nine German cities to mull a switch from the
U.S. software giant to providers of open-source products..."
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Nine German cities poised to adopt Linux (InfoWorld) Posted Sep 17, 2003 17:52 UTC (Wed) by libra (guest, #2515) [Link] Steve Ballmer will have to visit Germany again. I hope he likes beer...
Nine German cities poised to adopt Linux (InfoWorld) Posted Sep 17, 2003 19:33 UTC (Wed) by tomsi (subscriber, #2306) [Link] In this area, Mr. Ballmer needs to like white wine!This area covers the Mosel and Rhine river, where a lot of very good Cheers,
Nine German cities poised to adopt Linux (InfoWorld) Posted Sep 17, 2003 20:33 UTC (Wed) by oever (subscriber, #987) [Link] Near Koblenz it is also dangerous sailing. The Lorelei (a beautiful woman on arock in the Rhine) has sunk many a ship and on a holiday last month, a friend of mine crashed his car into the car in front of him. The statue of Lorelei was looking straight at the wreckage. Let's hope Lorelei does not shift her core business from ships to cars to Linux computers. I think she'd like the challenge.
NT support Posted Sep 17, 2003 19:36 UTC (Wed) by gerardm (guest, #7388) [Link] One reason mentioned that is really something is the support for Windows NT or, the lack thereoff. Even before the end of the support period Microsoft had dropped support. The reason mentioned was the cost of fixing bugs.The cost of not fixing bugs is now starting to tell. Certainly when you compare it to the ongoing support for old versions of Linux. Thanks,
NT support Posted Sep 17, 2003 20:34 UTC (Wed) by pointwood (subscriber, #2814) [Link] Well, you don't get better deals with various Linux distros...
Linux support vs. NT support Posted Sep 17, 2003 21:39 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] You can buy support for any Linux distro from competing local vendors. You can only get support for NT from Microsoft, and now not even from them.
Linux support vs. NT support Posted Sep 18, 2003 0:43 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] I think what pointwood meant is that no distro would provide cheap (let alone free as in beer) support for their software when it becomes as old as Windows NT is now. Sure, you can buy one of the Red Hat's enterprise offerings, but you won't get a better deal than with Microsoft, at least in terms of money per CPU.
Linux support vs. NT support Posted Sep 18, 2003 12:57 UTC (Thu) by stuart (subscriber, #623) [Link] The point is with old linux *someone* can still support it. With NT if M$ doesn't, then no-one does.Old Linux is easy to support because so many of the individual components of a linux distro can e.g. be upgraded/replaced without changing anything/too much else.
NT support Posted Sep 18, 2003 1:21 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] Imagine a scenario like this: several of those cities come together and employ a few capable sysadmins/programmers that have a sole purpose of patching security holes and major bugs in the chosen distro. They could do that almost forever (or at least for the lifetime of the hardware) at a very small cost when divided among all those involved.Something like this is entirely impossible with MS or any other proprietary product because they are not open source. Once the support is dropped by the vendor, you're done. With Linux, you can continue doing it yourself. I used to maintain my own flavour of RH 6.x for a while (i.e. added RPMS like OpenSSH, modified RH RPMS, prepared ISO images, burn CD-Rs etc.) and it wasn't all that hard. Imagine what a small team of dedicated people could do...
NT support Posted Sep 18, 2003 2:05 UTC (Thu) by neoprene (guest, #8520) [Link] Imagine this... $45 Billion in cash. Fire all the employees and send a little dividend check every year to the stock holders.Monopoly stranglehold of desktop operating systems is just plain wrong. BTW, if anyone sends you a .doc or .xls by e-mail, don't open it, just return a message with a request for .ps or .pdf.
NT support Posted Sep 18, 2003 2:15 UTC (Thu) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] > BTW, if anyone sends you a .doc or .xls by e-mail, don't open it, just return a message with a request for .ps or .pdf.Already have procmail doing that for me :-)
NT support Posted Sep 18, 2003 7:33 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link] > M$ knows the clock is ticking. When it is too late they will opensource> windoze to attract "developers". Yes, I agree. > If they had any brains they should preserve their office applications before > solid alterantives appear by porting their apps to Linux right now. Yes, I'm sure there would be many customers for MS Office or Outlook if it was available on Linux/Unix. OTOH then there would be more or less no reason left to install Windows. Alex
NT support Posted Sep 18, 2003 15:39 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] That's why we should be helping Wine. Switching mail client may be too painful for some people. They should have an option to use the same mail client on the new OS. The same applies to word processors.
NT support Posted Sep 18, 2003 10:18 UTC (Thu) by djabsolut (guest, #12799) [Link] Microsuck is "preserving" its office applications through the release of the "new" Office suite. As usual, the .doc files will not be readable by older versions of Word (insert your favourite "it forces everybody to upgrade and Microsuck gets more money" statement). The added twist is that they will have a form of encryption, which will be protected by the DMCA (read: it will be illegal to reverse engineer it). Result: office suite alternatives like OpenOffice/StarOffice will not be able to read the new .doc files, thus no interoperability, thus people will not be willing to switch easily, thus you have a perfect vendor lock-in. OSDL/OSI should start pushing for an amendment to DMCA to prevent this kind of abuse.PS. Did I mention Microsuck is evil?
NT support Posted Sep 18, 2003 14:10 UTC (Thu) by donwaugaman (subscriber, #4214) [Link] IANAL, of course, but the DMCA does have a "reverse engineering for interoperability" clause. Naturally, this has not been tested in court, so no doubt plenty of MS lawyers have arguments for why it would not apply to a hypothetical new OpenOffice import filter. However, building such an import filter would appear to have a lot more legal protection than, say, downloading the latest dreck from Britney Spears.
A news headline leaks back in time from 2010 Posted Sep 18, 2003 15:38 UTC (Thu) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link] Last German city switches to LinuxCelebrates transition with wake around white-inscribed blue tombstone. France switching government to NetBSD to demonstrate independence, considers firewalling off USA to reduce spam and virus traffic; Spain switching to FreeBSD to show support without being too obvious.
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