Extremadura dropping Linex [LWN.net]

Back in 2006, LWN carried the announcement that the government of the Spanish state of Extremadura was moving to a locally-developed distribution called Linex. Now comes the sad news that the project has been ended, along with the contracts of the developers who were working on it. One of those developers, José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, has posted his view on what has happened. "The new people in charge of the Extremadura government don't like the good press and name that Linex, and the free software, gave to the previous party in the government. And they want to change things. I don't say they're going to remove all the free software we have in education (I don't think that's technically possible, and also we can not afford it ), but they maybe will move from Debian to Ubuntu or to OpenSUSE or Fedora. They are firing all the people who made the previous situation possible." (Thanks to Paul Wise).

to post comments

Extremadura dropping Linex

Posted Jan 1, 2012 18:11 UTC (Sun) by realnc (guest, #60393) [Link] (3 responses)

> The new people in charge of the Extremadura government don't like the
> good press and name that Linex, and the free software, gave to the
> previous party in the government.

If they had good press and a good name, they wouldn't have lost the elections :-P

Extremadura dropping Linex

Posted Jan 1, 2012 18:32 UTC (Sun) by oever (guest, #987) [Link] (1 responses)

If you read the full email you will realize that Mr Rodríguez thinks that the new government wants to make the Linex success of the previous government look bad and replace it. If they want to move away from free software this will be very expensive for them. Last paragraph is important:

So, now they need to say that Linex was very expensive (which is totally false, maybe it's expensive having thousand of computers in education or funding big congresses, but not doing Linex at all, because there has been at maximum 10 person working in Linex in the peak moments, but for a long time, only two people were doing all the technical job). They're making a lot of noise to justify their future changes. I don't feel optimistic about those future changes, because they're are motivated by personal ambitions more than by technical or economical realities, so we can hope many nasty surprises in the future.

Extremadura dropping Linex

Posted Jan 1, 2012 18:37 UTC (Sun) by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417) [Link]

Just to clarify, he does not think they want to move to a proprietary OS on the client. He expects a switch to a different Linux distro (not much of a change if it's Debian or Ubuntu).

Extremadura dropping Linex

Posted Jan 2, 2012 8:32 UTC (Mon) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

> If they had good press and a good name, they wouldn't have lost the elections :-P

They had a good press and good name about their support of Linux, but unfortunately in politics the use of free software is not the only issue that matters. There was sth. problematic with European (in general) and Spanish (in particular) economics in the last years, that is not related much to Linux. Maybe this kind of stuff affectec the people of Extremadura more than free software?

Extremadura dropping Linex

Posted Jan 1, 2012 20:17 UTC (Sun) by se7bulg (guest, #82058) [Link] (2 responses)

Emmm.. I'm sorry - but they're simply moving to another Linux distro. Honestly - IMHO - that's a good thing because how many distros based on Debian unstable branch do we really need???? What were the reasons to create Linex in the first place????

Extremadura dropping Linex

Posted Jan 2, 2012 2:01 UTC (Mon) by yarikoptic (guest, #36795) [Link] (1 responses)

You might like to read an email of a leading Linex developer to get the answers to your questions: http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2012/01/msg00007.html
Overall, it wasn't just "yet another Debian derivative" not to mention that Extremadura sponsored annual Debian conference in 2009 (DebConf9): http://debconf9.debconf.org/

Extremadura dropping Linex

Posted Jan 2, 2012 17:31 UTC (Mon) by joey (guest, #328) [Link]

Extremadura also sponsored many smaller Debian developer gatherings. I got to go multiple times to a beautiful part of Spain I'd probably never have heard of.

Not that bad

Posted Jan 1, 2012 20:43 UTC (Sun) by dcg (subscriber, #9198) [Link] (4 responses)

As a spanish citizien who supports open source, I'm OK with this. We have too many "regional distros" in Spain, for no good reason: Extremadura has only 1.1 million of citizens. Administrations should use distros already available and contribute to improve these distros, instead of reinventing the wheel.

Not that bad

Posted Jan 1, 2012 22:35 UTC (Sun) by cantsin (guest, #4420) [Link] (3 responses)

Reinventing the wheel with in-house distributions was the major reason why Linux failed in German public administration. This would be worth an LWN article: How Free/Open Source software has been abused in Europe by IT consultants/departments as a device to write more work hours for themselves.

No reinvention in Extremadura or Munich

Posted Jan 2, 2012 2:23 UTC (Mon) by knuty (guest, #43295) [Link]

First it's a false implication that public administrations in Extremadura or Munich are reinventing the wheel, when running a GNU/Linux system on 80-100% of the computers. Those projects are using standard long term supported GNU/Linux distroes, working upstream as much as they can.

Secondly there are no chance of writing additional work hours when supporting GNU/Linux in Extremaduras schools or the city administration in Munich. The last three-four years Spain has been hit hard with an economical crisis with 37% unemployment rate by 18-25 year old people and 20% in general. There are no tax money to spare for additional consultants in Spanish public administrations. The same goes for Germany where the big tax money from the middle class is used to bail out Greece, Italy and other mostly South-European countries for irresponsible and straight out lies regarding financial management on state level the last 9-10 years.

Thirdly this cost of computer support in Extremadura and Munich is second to none taken into account the difference between school systems and public administration. As José Rodríguez point out, Extremadura got maximum 10 persons doing technical support on 120.000 computers, where as little as two persons are doing this work for most of the time. At peak "employment", one person supports 12.000 computers. Usually it's on person for 60.000 computers. And we are talking about a managed computer operation, not a home computer with no professional support. The 12.000 GNU/Linux computers out of 15.000 in Munich are supported by 8-9 persons, translated into one man-year for 1500 computers. You can go much further in schools regarding standardization, where a city administration may got 20-30 different types of departments (read: "use-cases") from firefighters to healthcare. And by the way, the GNU/Linux transition in Munich is on track:

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/de-munichs-move-vendor-i...

What about the claim that consultants uses free and open source software to write more work hours for themselves then? I first heard a similar claim from a Microsoft consultant hired by a city council I was helping back in 2003. The consultant said free and open source software was cheap to acquire and expensive to maintain. Implying that customers should stick with Microsoft. I thought it was strange that a person who evidently was writing many work hours maintaining Microsoft products, took the luxury to complain on competing products. Especially where my short conversation with him was cut short by one of the municipality employees, because he was so expensive.

I asked the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) on the "expensive to maintain" claim. A claim which are constantly re-iterated by Microsoft consultants to customers and at online forums. The CTO said that the Microsoft consultant got it wrong. He and other proprietary consultants are invoicing them the most according to the accounting. The city council computer department preferred free and open source software wherever it was feasible, because it was extremely stable and they could do more of the upkeep them self, saving the trouble of hiring a proprietary consultant. The few times they needed a consultant on free and open source software, it was not difficult to get. They didn't pay more for each hour either.

I need to mention the GNU/Linux failure at German embassies. They got into trouble because of the old OpenOffice.org version they deployed didn't read newer Microsoft documents (OOXML). They didn't have a plan for backporting a newer OpenOffice version to their existing installation. Also they didn't got a proper plan for upgrading to a newer long term support GNU/Linux distro. Remember all software needs to be upgraded and updated periodically. Here is no difference between a free software distro or a proprietary platform.

Also an maintained enterprise deployed computer platforms needs configuration management and updates from time to time, independently if it's proprietary or free software. It's not like a home computer, where you might forget that such way of computer support cost more work hours a year, than a school computer in Extremadura or a office computer in Munich.

My grief regarding the German embassies, is that the computer staff in many ways approached free software maintained as they historically maintained Windows. For each Windows version, you start fresh, replacing 40-60% of the software. Repackaging every end user binary for enterprise deployment on the new OS version. Upstream mechanism don't exists, either does backports or free software configuration management. Using Windows upkeep methods on Linux is unwise. You should use the built in package management and configuration systems, including other enterprise features (which are all there). If there are something to learn from Extreamdura and Munich, is that upstream is what you should aim for, including proper backports for tackling newer Microsoft documents (OOXML) with Libre/OpenOffice. And you should have an upgrade plan for the next long term supported version of GNU/Linux distro you're deploying. This are lesson learned from Extremadura and Munich.

Not that bad

Posted Jan 2, 2012 8:42 UTC (Mon) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link] (1 responses)

> Reinventing the wheel with in-house distributions was the major reason why Linux failed in German public administration.

To my knowledge here in Germany nobody "reinvented the wheel". A lot of errors have been made, but "reinvention" was not among the errors. "Failed" is not really correct, because e.g. in the foreign office the backlash towards MS was at least partly a political decision, when the political leadership changed from the Green party Fischer to "neo-liberal" Westerwelle. As for Munich: Isn't the change towards Linux still ongoing? Sorry, as a Prussian, I'm not well-informed about those Bavarians :~)

Not that bad

Posted Jan 7, 2012 21:46 UTC (Sat) by mbanck (guest, #9035) [Link]

> As for Munich: Isn't the change towards Linux still ongoing?

Yes, it is. And they seem to have accelerated the migration over the last 1-2 years, they migrated the 9000th desktop at the end of last year, out of around 12000 planned overall, see (in german) http://www.it-muenchen-blog.de/2011/12/munchen-hat-den-9-...

Disclaimer: I work for a company doing external support and development for the Limux project.

Michael

Extremadura dropping Linex

Posted Jan 2, 2012 0:12 UTC (Mon) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link] (1 responses)

This is what happens when you try to use the force of government to propel your pet idea... You don't use politics, politics uses YOU.

Extremadura dropping Linex

Posted Jan 5, 2012 20:37 UTC (Thu) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

> You don't use politics, politics uses YOU.

In Soviet Russia?

Extremadura dropping Linex

Posted Jan 2, 2012 3:33 UTC (Mon) by forlwn (guest, #63934) [Link] (2 responses)

Those are second tier democracies.
They replace good a cheap for bad and expensive.
then, the FMI will take care of them.

Extremadura dropping Linex

Posted Jan 2, 2012 11:59 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link]

Yes, while first tier democracies go around blatantly disregarding international law and wasting trillions on idiotic crusades, the FMI does nothing.

Extremadura dropping Linex

Posted Jan 9, 2012 11:26 UTC (Mon) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link]

As silly as this government appears to be behaving, and as much as I sympathize with the frustration of the fired staff, I fail to see how Ubuntu, OpenSuse or Fedora are more expensive than Debian.