Vienna to softly embrace Linux

Open source has won another convert in the local government sector, with soft migrations to Linux imminent across Vienna’s municipal authority.

The Austrian capital city of Vienna’s local government is due to start migrating its desktop PCs to open source software in the second quarter of this year.

Erwin Gillich, the head of IT at Vienna’s municipal authority, said this will be a ’soft migration’ where users have the option of switching from Microsoft Office 2000 to the open source productivity application OpenOffice.org, and from Microsoft Windows 2000 to Linux. As OpenOffice.org runs on Windows as well as Linux, users can switch the productivity application without changing their operating system.

Of its 16,000 desktop PCs, Vienna has identified 7,500 that could be migrated to OpenOffice.org, of which 4,800 could migrate to Linux, according to Gillich. The IT department is offering to install OpenOffice.org or Linux free of charge on PCs and will charge departments less money if they run these open source applications rather than running Microsoft Office or Windows. Users that make the change will be offered support and training, said Gillich.

This price advantage is likely to encourage some departments to migrate, but it is unlikely that more than a few hundred users will migrate to open source software in the first year, said Gillich. Over time he expects this number to increase, but he believes it is unlikely that all users who are given the option will choose to switch.

“We want it to be a success, but the internal market will decide,” said Gillich. “I don’t think it will be as many as 7,500 PCs. The better it  OpenOffice.org and Linux] works, the more will take it. It’s a bit cheaper therefore it can afford to be a bit worse, but not much worse.”

Vienna will start offering departments the option of moving to open source software in May or June this year.

Source: ZDNet UK