In a setback for the City of Vienna's three-year-old open-source migration programme, city authorities decided on Wednesday to scrap most of the systems that have so far adopted the city's custom-built Linux distribution, instead approving an €8m migration to Windows Vista.
The Vienna district council on Wednesday formally approved a budget of €8m (£6.3m) for migrating Windows 2000 systems to Vista and Office 2007, according to a report from Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), the Austrian national public service broadcaster.
The Vista migration will include 720 kindergarten systems that had been migrated to Wienux, a Debian-based Linux distribution developed internally by the city's IT body.
"This is a major setback to the city's Linux migration," said Marie Ringler, a member of the district council and representative of the Vienna Green Party, according to the report.
A key factor in the rollback decision is software used in a kindergarten language-learning programme called 'Schlaumäuse', which requires Internet Explorer, according to city officials quoted in the report.
The Schlaumäuse programme, launched in December 2007, aims to improve language skills for children of immigrant backgrounds, and has Microsoft as its principal backer, according to the Austrian Federal Chamber of Commerce (WKO).
The Schlaumäuse software requires several IE plug-ins and caused frequent crashes in Wine, the Linux software used to run Windows applications on Linux, said Erwin Gillich, the head of IT at Vienna's municipal authority, according to the ORF's report.
The software maker behind the Schlaumäuse software is planning a Firefox version for 2009, according to Ringler, who pointed out in the report that the city could have subsidised a Firefox version of the software for a fraction of the cost of the Windows Vista migration.
The city has not offered enough incentives for migration to Linux and the open-source productivity application OpenOffice.org, which is carried out on a voluntary basis, according to Ringler.
The city's IT department reportedly said there had also been hardware detection problems under Linux.
Vienna's IT body, MA 14, is reportedly planning the Vista migration to be completed next year.
The Socialist Party, Austrian People's Party and the Freedom Party voted in favour of the Vista migration, while the Greens opposed the move, according to the ORF.
Despite the setback, city officials remained positive about the Wienux programme.
The city body responsible for kindergartens, the MA 10, said the schools will continue to use Wienux under a dual-boot system, and MA 10 department head Christine Spiess told the ORF that the body had generally had a positive experience with Linux.
The city will continue to develop Wienux and offer it to city council users on a voluntary basis, Gillich told the ORF.
In 2005 Gillich described the project as 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.
Talkback
If I lived and paid tax in Vienna I would be asking some pretty uncomfortable questions about this. €8m plus whats been spent on the custom Linux distro is a lot of money to replace something that is essentially already working when its only one application that is causing problems and there is a fix only a year away. Seems to me there is more to this than the lame excuse that has been provided here, maybe the deal that's been struck with Microsoft needs to be examined to see the real reason for the change of heart. After all migrating to Vista is no picnic and they are bound to have to scrap a lot of older hardware as part of roll out.
Which also opens the system to more botnets, zombies, adware, malware,
virus infections, and porn delivered to children's eyes. Looks like more money under the table or threats of bodily harm. There is no depth to which M$ will sink to stop Linux adoption. Forced to use IE is not a legitimate reason for switching to a 3rd rate OS.
It seems that every time there is a high profile adoption of Linux and/or open standards this is shortly followed by a hiatus, retraction and reversal which, in the minds of the suspicious, leads one to believe that M$ has brought pressure to bear one way or another.
It is particularly interesting to note that the Mozilla Organisation have stated that, for a fraction of the £6.3 pounds being spent to abandon this roll out of Linux, they could have enabled the kindergarten language-learning programme called 'Schlaumäuse' to run in Firefox, but which currently only runs in Internet Explorer and which was the stated reason for the U turn. Mozilla is apparently already working to achieve this.
So it does seem there are so many questions to be asked but once again M$ have prevailed whether we like it or not. Personally, I would like the choice and the freedon to choose, even if I end up by choosing (voluntarily, that is) M$, but the lack of this choice is unhealthy. 'nough said!
very bad article. The computers will be dual-boot, not replaced!
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7674
I hardly think the kit that has been purchased with running Linux in mind is going to be sufficiently high spec to run Vista. I would think that most of these machines will either need major upgrade or replacement. This whole sorry mess is typical of government based IT projects, at least its shows that this sort of thing doesn't only happen in the UK.