The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Vienna goes Oh! for open source

Happy IT director?

Ensure Ease of Recovery with Asigra’s Agentless Software

The city of Vienna's move to open source is going well but will never embrace every desktop machine.

Vienna's IT director Erwin Gillich told the Reg: "It's all going well. We carried out a study two years ago looking at how many desktop machines we could move to Linux. The percentage is higher now but still not 100 per cent." Gillich said the council would ignore some desktop machines which would be too difficult to move to Linux. Gillich said some applications would not work properly on Linux.

Gillich told us: "SAP's Business Warehouse needs Microsoft Excel to work properly and our electronic filing system is not totally able to run on Linux."

Although the move to the Linux operating system is going slowly, interest in applications, specifically Open Office, is growing faster. Some 2,500 users are now running Open Office against 200 running the Linux operating system.

Vienna's IT department charges users a maintenance or service fee rather than a licence fee. Gillich said charges for Microsoft and Linux were the same because the amount of maintenance required was the same.

Charges vary according to type of machine and could be as high as €1,500 a year. Users moving to Open Office get a €62 discount, and those running it on Linux get an extra €31 discount.

Vienna is using its own version of the Debian distro for the project.

Some more on ZDnet here and lots more detail from Vienna's IT department here.®

Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider

More from The Register

Bjarne Again: Hallelujah for C++
Plus: Now officially OK to admit you never used STL algorithms
Interwebs taunt Sir Jony over Apple eye candy makeover
Hey Ive, Ive... add more unicorns, willya?
SCO vs. IBM battle resumes over ownership of Unix
Zombie lawsuit back and wants to suck the brains out of Linux
Nuke plants to rely on PDP-11 code UNTIL 2050!
Programmers and their walking sticks converge in Canada
Red Hat to ditch MySQL for MariaDB in RHEL 7
So long, Oracle! Don't let the door hit you on the way out
Shy? Socially inadequate? Fiddling with your phone could help
App 'tells the brutal truth' about social inadequates' chatup lines
Java EE 7 melds HTML5 with enterprise apps
New release arrives with GlassFish, NetBeans support
 breaking news
'Office Facebook' firm Tibbr wants you to PAY for mobe-meetings app
Great idea. Punters won't cough for it though
 breaking news
The only Waze is Google: Ad giant tipped to gobble map app 'for $1.3bn'
Pac-Man-satnav-ish upstart in bidding war with Apple, Facebook
 breaking news
PM Cameron calls for modern, programmable computers! (We think)
IT education musings to G8 chiefs to mystify IT industry