The city of Munich generated excitement when it announced plans to convert 14,000 municipal desktops from Windows to Linux. Those plans have since been delayed due to legal issues, but many saw this as a start of a trend. And so when Paris, France, announced that it too was looking at converting 17,000 desktops, open-source pundits responded enthusiastically.
But last week, “an assistant to Francois Dagnaud, the man in charge of the Paris executive’s drive to modernize its IT, revealed that the total revolution hoped for by fans of the General Public License and OpenOffice and feared by Microsoft won’t happen.” And here is the clincher, he added that the move “would mean significant additional costs without improving the service provided.” Story on ZDNet (http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5409773.html) and elsewhere.
So, Munich delayed and Paris effectively halted. What does this mean for Linux, open-source, and Microsoft? Talk among yourselves!
Paris: Open-Source Move Too Costly
3 responses to “Paris: Open-Source Move Too Costly”
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I think a lot of companies are simply threatening to go to Linux because they know Microsoft will come back with deep discounts.
I doubt this hurts Microsoft much in the short term – long term may be a different story. -
joel on software predicted something like that way back in jul-2003:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/oldnews/pages/July2003.html
postings on the 16th & 17th. -
I think thats boguss information, I was at OOoConf about 3 weeks ago and that migration IS happening. The problem has to do with how little knowledge on how they have on migrating systems at a large scale. Also that they are doing it themselves and that the government is not integrated at all.
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