The city government of Barcelona is switching to open source and Ubuntu!

[thewayne]

I think they have a good plan and have an excellent chance of success. Several years ago Munich tried to switch to Linux, and last year they switched back to Windows. They tried an everything in one shot approach, which I think is doomed from the get go. Barcelona is starting with replacing their Exchange servers with Open-XChange, Internet Explorer with Firefox, and Office with LibreOffice. Then they'll continue from there, eventually replacing the underlying Windows OS with Ubuntu after all of the apps are open source. I'm not sure when they'll be replacing their data center servers with Linux, it's not mentioned in the Europa.eu article.

Apparently this is part of a new European campaign called Public Money, Public Code, of which Barcelona is the first country to attempt such a conversion. It certainly won't be easy being the first, but they'll be able to provide LOTS of information to other municipalities who go down this path later.

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/public-money-public-code

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/01/15/0415219/city-of-barcelona-dumps-windows-for-linux-and-open-source-software

https://publiccode.eu/

There's a good comment on the Slashdot story:

"Most IT shops do not know the answer to three questions
1) How much (all up, everything) do we pay microsoft in licence fees per year
2) How much do we pay other vendors for licence fees
3) Over 3 years how much have we paid for software- all up, including lawyers, audits, and licence management packages, and administrators who add nothing to the bottom line ensuring 'compliance'"

This can be a compelling reason to go open source like this.

Comments

[silveradept]

I hope they document it exceedingly well. And that it succeeds, so that there might be a blueprint that I can wave at the IT folk and the management to get them to seriously consider going open-source.

[thewayne]

I'm sure they will.  Database systems are a difficult beast: while there are certainly open systems like PostegreSQL, Maria, and Mongo for VLDBs, most development houses will stick with MS and Oracle.  Which means more money for the development house when it comes time to upgrade.  I've heard of efforts to make library management systems open source, but I haven't heard of any resounding successes.

[silveradept]

They're still in the "getting to critical mass" phase, because there isn't really enough in the way of paying people what they're worth to have the IT departments or contracts to keep the ILS running smoothly.

Our biggest hurdle, honestly, would be proprietary DRM and Flash, neither of which work particularly well on Linux.

[devilc]

I think ultimately that this is a wise choice, but the system has to be flexible enough to allow for Windows or OSX machines when there is no viable linux alternative.

EX, your video production and graphic design shops will need Windows or OSX because last I looked, the linux answers to Adobe Creative Suite/Avid are woefully lacking in things that pros need.

[thewayne]

Macs work great on a Linux back-end, that's exactly what Russet's observatory is.  Windows, less so, but they can.

Yeah, I've been looking for an alternative to Adobe myself because I don't want to be locked in to a monthly subscription.  I'm still running Photoshop CS 6, that I purchased now five years ago.  I was evaluating a new photo editor but found that they don't work with my new camera RAW files, nor will CS 6.  I'm going to have to buy the current edition of Photoshop Elements, $85 one-shot purchase, to be able to manipulate them the way that I want to.  Once I get the initial adjustment done, then I can take that Photoshop file in to CS 6 for final work. For video, I find Apple iMovie works fine.  And they have a student suite of "pro-level" programs available for about $300 that I'll get if I find that I need more.

But open source photo manipulation?  Forget it.