Barcelona city officials have voted to shut the door on Microsoft Windows in favor of the Linux operating system and open source technology. The city hopes to save money from proprietary software license fees and to build a specialized library of open source applications targeting the needs of government workers. Its goal is to encourage specialized open source solutions throughout governmental agencies in Spain. The city last fall unveiled the Barcelona Digital City Plan to improve government-provided online services. The plan also supports urban technology and smart-city projects and promotes open data.
Brilliant news, the more people that do this the better. I went from Windows to Mac, and now to Linux. Raspberry PI is a great machine for backups and VPN access, or to create your own cloud. Ubuntu 17.10 is a great desktop OS. Bit by bit I am removing these expensive controlled systems and going for much lower price things that work great with OpenSource software.
Please let's not get enthusiastic with this. The reason for this change is purely political. Post-communist and anti-capitalists parties, with some support from the Socialist Party of Catalonia, agreed to rule together in Barcelona city. This has nothing to do with what works best for the city, since, unfortunately, 80% of all national governement web sites, including those by the autonomous government of Catalonia, as of today don't work well with web browsers other than Internet Explorer. It will be interesting to see how productive governement workers become now.
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Barcelona Opts for Breath of Open Source Fresh Air
Posted by: Jack M. Germain January 20, 2018 11:00 AMBarcelona city officials have voted to shut the door on Microsoft Windows in favor of the Linux operating system and open source technology. The city hopes to save money from proprietary software license fees and to build a specialized library of open source applications targeting the needs of government workers. Its goal is to encourage specialized open source solutions throughout governmental agencies in Spain. The city last fall unveiled the Barcelona Digital City Plan to improve government-provided online services. The plan also supports urban technology and smart-city projects and promotes open data.